Voyages To Vinland The First American Saga Newly Translated And Interpreted

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D OD01

TRAVEL ADVENTURE

OUTPOST OF EMPIRE BY Herbert Eugene Bolton

SAVAGE CIVILIZATION BY Tom Harrisson

EAST OF THE GREAT GLACIER BY Helge Ingstad

THE STORY OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY

EXPLORATION BY Charles E. Key

HELL-HOLE OF CREATION BY L. M. Nesbitt
TO THE LOST WORLD BY Paul A. Zahl

These are BORZOI BOOKS, published by Alfred A. Knopf

e9

VOYAGES TO VINLAND

The first American saga

VOYAGTTS

TO VINLAND

The first American saga

newly translated and interpreted
by EINAR HAUGEN

Thompson Professor of Scandinavian Languages
University of Wisconsin Illustrated by

FREDERICK TRENCH CHAPMAN

ALFRED A. KNOPF 1942 NEW YORK

1942 by Einar Haugen and Frederick T.
.GJiapman. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
-reproduced in any form without permission in writing from
the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief pas-
sages or reproduce not more than three illustrations in a
review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper. Manufac-
tured in the United States of America. Published simulta-
neously in Canada by The Ryerson Press.

TO THE BRAVE NORSEMEN
OF OUR DAY

WHO SAIL THE COURSE OF LEIF AND ERIC
FOR THE FREEDOM OF THEIR NATIVE SOIL

FOREWORD

The American public has too long been led to believe, in
the words of one obscure writer, that the Norse claim to
American discovery and exploration " rests entirely upon
tradition, poetic legends, and some slight circumstantial
evidence/' This view has been encouraged by the fact that
most of the books which have been available to the general
public on this subject are uncritical and wildly specu-
lative. They use the known facts as springboards for
imaginative flights and produce a justified reaction of
skepticism in many of their readers. Those tomes, on the
other hand, which present the facts solidly and without
exaggeration are usually too learned or inaccessible for
general reading. Through the agitation of various writ-
ers and Scandinavian groups in this country, a consider-
able interest has been awakened in the subject. But one
is hard put to it when the request comes for further infor-
mation. There is genuine need for a book that will pre-
sent in readable form the text of the sagas dealing with the
Norse discoveries, and sift out from the enormous schol-
arship of the subject those facts that seem well-established
and give them a proper setting. It is hoped that this need
may in some degree be met by the present book, which
was made possible by a group of book-lovers and book-
makers in Chicago banded together under the name of
" Holiday Press."

The reader should be triply warned before entering
upon the Saga of Finland.

vi Foreword

First of all: this translation is a new one, made directly
from the original manuscripts of the thirteenth and four-
teenth centuries as reproduced by A. M. Reeves. It was
made for the members of the Holiday Press with the inten-
tion of rendering the old sagas as vividly and understand-
ably as possible to modern readers. Samuel Laing's trans-
lation of a century ago, which appears in the Everyman's
Library, is antiquated; Reeves' translation of 1890 is stiff
and unreadable; G. Gathorne-Hardy's of 1924 is readable,
but distinctly British in idiom, besides being the property
of the Oxford Press. A new translation could be justified
only by the need for bringing before the American public
a clear, concise, readable version in the modern American
idiom. This saga is the earliest document of American
history, and if for no other reason, it deserves an Ameri-
can version.

But if it is done into modern American, one may ask,
are we not violating the spirit of the medieval documents?
This might be true, if they had been a part of the romantic
tradition of the Middle Ages. But the family sagas of Ice-
land are deeply rooted in the realism of everyday life.
They are plain, unadorned tales told by simple folk con-
cerning authentic events in the lives of their own ances-
tors. Their style is straightforward and unvarnished, for
they were spoken before they were written. Many trans-
lators have outrageously violated their spirit by turning
them into romantic, medieval English, as if they were
tales of King Arthur and his noble knights. The sagas
come from another and humbler sphere: they are the
stories of sailors and adventurers, merchants and farmers,
shepherds and fishermen, told with the humor and the
simplicity of the common man. We who live today can
best enter into their world if they are allowed to speak to
us in the simple, direct accents of our own day. The trans-

Foreword vii

later has not sought to vulgarize them by making them
slangy or jocular, but has used modern and colloquial
idioms wherever these seemed to render the spirit of the
original.

Where Laing translated, " Now we have two occupa-
tions to attend to/' and Reeves wrote, " We will now di-
vide our labors/' this translator says, " From now on we
have two jobs on our hands/' Where Reeves translated,
" The wind waxed amain/' this version puts it, " A storm
blew up." According to Reeves, Leif says to the straying
Tyrker, " Wherefore art thou so belated, foster-father
mine, and astray from the others? " The hearty Leif would
not have recognized this artificial speech as his own; he
simply said, " Why were you so late, foster-father, and
how did you get parted from your company? " It would
not have occurred to the unlucky Thorvald to speak in
these lofty terms: " I counsel you now to retrace your way
with the utmost speed." His speech is simple and unaf-
fected: " I advise you to make ready for your return as
quickly as possible."

Another step in making these stories presentable to the
lay reader has been the harmonization of the two versions.
We shall get no real feeling of the impression made on the
Norsemen by their discoveries unless we allow the two
versions to supplement rather than contradict one an-
other. In the opinion of the present writer both of them
go back to men who were familiar with the original events,
and each has preserved certain facets of these events. So
they have here been combined into a coherent account of
the Norse discoveries somewhat in the manner of G.
Gathorne-Hardy's version. The manuscripts have been
closely followed, but certain episodes and statements that
would only confuse the lay reader have boldly been omit-
ted, while valuable items from other sources have some-

Vlll

Foreword

times been inserted in the text. Any one who is interested
in re-examining the problems of the text will in any case
have to go to the magnificent edition of A. M. Reeves. Our
interest here has been to weld out of the manuscripts a
true Saga of Vinland. In so doing we are not far from the
practice of Iceland's ancient saga scribes, who listened to
different versions of the same story and then used their
own judgments in creating a coherent, probable account.

A third step in making the saga acceptable to the Ameri-
can reader has been our policy of treating the rather diffi-
cult Icelandic names. One of the most discouraging aspects
of the sagas to a modern reader is their extreme fondness
for lists of names, many of which sound alike and confuse
the story. Here, again, consistency has given way to the
needs of the reader. Some of these names have long been
familiar in English, and have acquired traditional forms.
It would be foolish to write Olafr or Thorr, when these
are well-known under the simpler forms of " Olaf " and
" Thor." '

The name of our hero Leif has aroused more ardent
controversy than that of any other character. The form
here presented is Leif Ericson. Some of the other contend-
ers, all vehemently championed by various schools of
thought, are Leifr or Leiv for the given name, and Erics-
son, Erickson, Erikson, Eriksson, Eriksen, or Eiriksson for
the patronymic. Most of these bear the mark of modern
Scandinavian sound developments. For our purposes the
only real problem involved is this: shall we retain the
original form of the name unchanged, or shall we give it
a more acceptable English form? In Old Norse it was gen-
erally written Leifr Eiriksson, though Hauksbok is the
only one of the three manuscripts of this saga that does so;
AM 557 4to writes Eireksson and Flateyarbok dEireksson.
But the name Eirikr was borrowed into English a long

Foreword ix

time ago in the form Eric. Through long usage this form
has become as natural to English as Erik is to modern
Scandinavian. In English, also, the ending -son is always
added directly to a name, without intervening s. This
leaves us with only two choices in English: either the origi-
nal Leifr Eiriksson or the anglicized Leif Ericson. All the
other forms are based on modern Scandinavian speech
habits and have no special relevance for English. But just
as Christopher Columbus bears a traditionally anglicized
name instead of his original one, so Leif is best presented
in English form. The needs of the reader are best served
by a form that rolls most easily from the tongue, when this
is one that does not violate the spirit of the original. It is
hoped that this form may be widely adopted, to eliminate
the confusion which drove the Chicago Park Board, in
desperation, to choose one of the least appropriate of all
forms, the strictly modern Dano-Norwegian Eriksen.

Other names ending in -son have been treated accord-
ingly when they occur in the old saga. Such a form as
Bjarni Herjulfson is therefore to be understood as a short-
cut for " Bjarni, Herjulf s son," which might have been a
better English rendition except for its awkwardness. The
old Norsemen regularly identified themselves as sons of
their fathers, a practice which still flourishes in Iceland.

A great many placenames and nicknames consist of ele-
ments whose meaning is completely clear to any Scandi-
navian, but which are merely a jumble of meaningless
letters to an American. Whenever such names could easily,
be translated into a similar English form which would
give them some of the vividness in English that they have
in Icelandic, this was done. Instead of 0xna-Thori we
have written " Ox-Thori," for Furdustrandir " Wonder-
strands," for Haukdalir " Hawkdale," and for Breida-
fjgrdr " Broadfjord." This we have not done for Finland,

x Foreword

Markland, and Helluland, because these are well-estab-
lished in English and not difficult to remember. Names
which would sound awkward in English translation were
usually left in a form approximating that of the Icelandic:
Brattahlid, Sudrey, Hraunhofn. One name has been de-
liberately changed in spelling to avoid a common mispro-
nunciation: *' Karlsevni " instead of Karlsefni.

The poems which appear in the text are of an exceed-
ingly intricate metrical form which could not possibly be
rendered into comprehensible English, and any English
versification that might be adopted would sound false.
Hence the poetry has simply been rendered into rhythmic
prose and set up in lines like those of the original.

In all aspects of translation our principle has been one:
to produce an accurate and readable version of the ancient
saga, by drawing upon the labors of specialists for the pleas-
ure and benefit of interested amateurs. With this brief apo-
logia we are happy to present: The Saga of Finland.

CONTENTS

SECTION I. The Saga of Vinland

i. Eric the Red settles in Greenland 5

ii. Bjarni Herjulfson glimpses unknown shores j

in. Leif Ericson at King Olafs court 1 2

iv. Leif Ericson explores Vinland 17

v. Thorvald Ericson goes exploring 26

vi. Thorbjorn and Gudrid emigrate 33

vn. Gudrid and the witch 39

viii. Thorstein Ericson looks for Vinland 45

ix. Karlsevni and Gudrid are married 51

x. Karlsevni leads an expedition 54

xi. Karlsevni meets the natives 66

xn. The sad fate of Bjarni Grimolfson 79

xin. Freydis seeks her fortune 83

xiv. Karlsevni and Gudrid return to Iceland 91

xii Contents

SECTION II. The Evidence of History
A Commentary on the Saga of Vinland

Adam of Bremen 97

The learned men of Iceland 101

Viking traditions 105

The two versions 112

The Land of Eric the Red 117

Voyages to Vinland 125

Where was Vinland? 135

In search of relics 146

Results and significance 160

Notes and References 173

Index follows page 181

ILLUSTRATIONS

Bjarni Herjulfson sights new lands in the West 9
Leif Ericson sails off to explore the lands seen by Bjarni 15

Eric the Red falls from his horse 19

Tyrker the German finds grapes 23

Leif rescues fifteen persons from a reef 27

Death of Thorvald Ericson 3 1

The burial of Thorvald at Crossness 3 5
Gudrid sings the magic songs for Thorbjorg the Witch 41

Thorstein Ericson foretells the future of Gudrid 49

The Scottish runners Haki and Hekja 5 5

Fish are caught in pits at high tide 59

The Skraelings exchange furs for strips of cloth 63

The Skraelings taste milk for the first time 67

The Bull terrifies the Skraelings 69

Freydis defies the Skraelings 73

Battle with the Skraelings 77

Freydis upbraids her husband, Thorvard 81

Freydis murders the -women of the expedition 85

Through torture Leif learns of Freydis' guilt 89
Gudrid with Snorri, the first white child born in America 93

SECTION I

THE SAGA OF VINLAND

Chapter I

FROM ICELAND'S BOOK OF SETTLEMENT

ERIC THE RED SETTLES
IN GREENLAND

At Jadar in Norway there lived a man named Thorvald,
who was the son of Osvald, the son of Ulf, the son of
Ox-Thori. He had a son named Eric the Red. Father and
son fled from Norway on account of a killing, and took
land at Hornstrands in Iceland, on a place called Drangar.
By this time Iceland was well settled. After Thorvald's
death, Eric was married to Thjodhild, a daughter of
Jorund Ulfson and Thorbjorg the Shipbreasted, whose
second husband was Thorbjorn of Hawkdale. After his
marriage Eric moved away from the north of Iceland,
cleared land in Hawkdale, and settled at Ericsstead near
Waterhorn.

Then Eric's slaves caused a landslide to crash down on
Valthjof 's Stead, a farm owned by one Valthjof. Eyolf the
Filthy, a relative of Valthjof s, killed the slaves at a place
not far from Waterhorn. For this Eric killed Eyolf and a
man named Raven the Fighter. He was prosecuted by
Eyolf s relatives, Geirstein and Odd at Jorvi, and they got
him banished from Hawkdale.

Eric then seized Brokey and Oxney, two islands in the
mouth of the fjord, and lived the first winter at Tradar on

4 Voyages to Vinland

Sudrey. Here he lent his neighbor Thorgest some hall
beams [the end pieces of a raised dais along the sides of
the hall]. Later he moved to Oxney, where he built a farm
and called it Ericsstead. He asked to get his hall beams
back, but was refused, and so he went to fetch them him-
self at Breidabolstead. Thorgest pursued him, and they
fought near the farm of Drangar. Two of Thorgest's sons
fell there, and some other men besides. After this both
Eric and his enemies kept their farms well-manned. Eric
was backed by Styr, by Eyolf from Sviney, the sons of
Thorbrand of Swandale, and Thorbjorn Vifilson. Thor-
gest's backing came from the sons of Thord the Yeller,
Thorgeir of Hitterdale, Aslak of Longdale, and his son
Illugi.

The case came up at the Thorsness Thing session, and
the Saga of the Ere-Dwellers tells us that there was a huge
crowd. Styr was Eric's special helper in court, and did what
he could to draw men away from Thorgest. He begged
Snorri the Chief not to help Thorgest's men pursue Eric
after the session. For this he promised to help Snorri some
other time, if Snorri should ever be in trouble. Eric had
his ship ready to sail in Eric's Bay. The court outlawed
him, but his friend Eyolf hid him in Dimun's Bay, while
Thorgest's men were out with many ships hunting for
him among the islands.

Thorbjorn and Eyolf and Styr accompanied him out be-
yond the islands, and there they said goodbye to him with
the greatest of friendliness. Eric assured them that he
would repay what they had done for him, if it lay within
his power, and if they should ever need it. He told his
friends that he planned to go in search of that country
which Gunnbjorn, son of Ulf the Crow, had sighted when
he blew out of his course to the west of Iceland. Gunn-
bjorn had seen some rocks, and they were known as

The Saga of V inland 5

Gunnbjorn's Reefs. Eric declared that if he found this
country, he would come back and tell his friends about it.

Eric sailed from Snowfell-Glacier, and first sighted A D
Greenland at Mid-Glacier, where there is a peak known as 082
Black-sark. Then he sailed southwards along the coast,
trying to find a livable spot, until he rounded the southern
tip. He spent the first winter at Eric's Island, midway in
what was later called the Eastern Settlement. The follow-
ing spring he made his way to Ericsfjord and there took
land for himself. That summer he spent much time ex-
ploring the uninhabited lands to the west, and wherever
he went, he gave names to the tracts he visited. The second
winter he lived at Eric's Holm off Hvarfsgnipa, near the
southern tip of Greenland. The third summer he went as
far north as Snowfell and entered Ravensfjord. He said
that he got as far as the head of Ericsfjord before he turned
back and spent the third winter on Eric's Island at the
mouth of the fjord.

The next summer he returned to Iceland, where he
landed in Broadfjord, and spent the winter with Ingolf at
Holmlatr. In the spring he fought once more with Thor- * r\
gest, but was beaten. After that a truce was patched up *,
between them. That summer Eric sailed away to colonize '
the country he had found. He called it Greenland, because
as he put it people would be more anxious to go
there if it had an attractive name. He told people that it
was admirably suited for settling, and that it was richly
endowed with nature's gifts: there was a great plenty of
game including seals, whales, walruses, bears, and other
animals. In this way he tried to persuade people to settle
in the new country.

Eric made his home at Brattahlid [Steep-slope] in Erics-
fjord. It is said by learned men that twenty-five ships sailed
from Broadfjord and Borgfjord in Iceland during the

6 Voyages to Vinland

summer that Eric settled in Greenland. But only fourteen
of these ever reached Greenland, for some were driven
back, and others were wrecked. That was fourteen [or
fifteen] years before Christianity was made the law in
Iceland.

Chapter II

FROM THE GREENLAND SAGA

BJARNI -HERJULFSON GLIMPSES
UNKNOWN SHORES

Herjulf was a son of Bard, the son of Herjulf. He was
related to that Ingolf who was the first settler in Iceland,
and who had given Herjulf s people land between Vog
and Reykjaness. Herjulf lived at Drepstock with his wife
Thorgerd and a son named Bjarni. This Bjarni was a
talented fellow and from early youth his thoughts had
turned to the sea. His trading voyages won him wealth
and honor; before long he mastered a ship of his own.
He made it his custom to live with his father in Iceland
one winter and sail abroad the next.

During the last winter that Bjarni was in Norway, his
father Herjulf broke up their home in Iceland and pre-
pared to leave for Greenland with Eric the Red. Aboard
Herjulf's ship there was a Christian man from the Hebri-
des, and he made a poem on the trip that was known as
" The Song of the Breakers." One verse ran as follows:

I pray our Christ will bless this voyage,
The faultless One, who tests His servants;
He rules the vaulted halls of heaven;
May He extend His hand o'er us!

8 Voyages to Vinland

Herjulf settled at Herjulfsness and was held in the great-
est respect.

That summer Bjarni sailed to Eyrar in Iceland only to
find that his father had left in the spring. This news
affected Bjarni a good deal, and he would not even trouble
to unload his ship. His men asked him what he had in
mind, and he answered that he planned to spend the win-
ter with his father as he had always done " and if you
will go with me, I shall steer straight for Greenland/'
They all agreed to do as he thought best.

Then Bjarni said, " People will call us fools for start-
ing off on this voyage we who have never been in the
Greenland seas! "

In spite of this, they put to sea as soon as they could get
ready and sailed for three days. There was then no land in
sight, the fair wind died down, and they were beset by fogs
and north winds until they lost all track of their course.
This went on for many days, and then the sun came out
again, so they could get their bearings. They hoisted sail
and sailed all day before they sighted land. They won-
dered what country this might be, but it was Bjarni's opin-
ion that it could not be Greenland. They asked him, was
he going to land, but he said, " It is my advice that we only
skirt the shore." As they did so, they found that the land
was not mountainous but covered with small wooded
knolls.

They left the land behind on their port side, with the
sheet pointed towards the shore. They sailed for two days
and found another country. They asked Bjarni if he
thought that this would be Greenland, but he replied that
this was no more Greenland than the other one, " for in
Greenland there are said to be huge glaciers." As they
approached the shore, they saw that it was a level country
and well wooded. The wind died down and the crew in-

BJARNI HERJULFSON SIGHTS NEW
LANDS IN THE WEST

The Saga of V inland 11

sisted that they ought to land, but Bjarni refused. The
men claimed that they were short of wood and water.
" You have no lack of either/' said Bjarni, but at this the
men grumbled a good deal. He told them to hoist sail, and
then they steered the ship away from shore.

For three days they sailed with a southwesterly breeze
before they caught sight of a third coast. This country had
many high mountains topped with glaciers. Again they
asked Bjarni if he was going to land, and again he said no,
" for this country looks pretty worthless to me." This time
they did not even furl their sail but steered along the coast
and found that it was an island. Again they left the country
astern and sailed away in the same direction. A storm blew
up and Bjarni told his crew to reef the sail and not to press
on any faster than their ship and her tackle could bear.

They sailed for four days and then they found a fourth
country. Again they asked Bjarni if he thought this was
Greenland, and Bjarni answered, " This is most like what
I have been told about Greenland, and here we shall try to
land/' So that evening they made their way to a jutting
headland. On the cape they found a boat, and it was the
very cape on which Herjulf, Bjarni 's father, had settled and
to which he had given his name, so that it has since been
known as Herjulfsness. Bjarni now went to his father's
house and from this time on he sailed no more. He lived
with his father as long as Herjulf was alive, and after that
he succeeded him and went on living there. But people
found fault with him for showing so little curiosity and
bringing back so little information about the countries he
had visited.

Chapter III

FROM THE KARLSEVNI SAGA

LEIF ERICSON AT KING
OLAFS COURT

Eric the Red lived at Brattahlid, where he was held in the
highest respect and deferred to by all. Eric's children were
Leif, Thorvald, Thorstein, and a daughter named Frey-
dis. She was married to one Thorvard and lived with him
at Gardar, which is now the Bishop's seat. She was a proud
and grasping woman, but Thorvard was a weakling. Thor-
stein lived at home with his father, and there was no more
promising youth in all Greenland. In those days the peo-
ple of Greenland were still pagan.

A T\ One summer Eric's son Leif sailed for Norway to visit
the court of King Olaf Trygvason. On his way from Green-

^ ' ' land he was blown out of his course and landed on the
Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland. The winds kept
blowing contrary for a long time, and he had to stay there
most of the summer. Here Leif grew fond of a woman
named Thorgunna. She was of good family, and, as Leif
discovered, not without some knowledge of secret lore.
When Leif was making ready to sail, Thorgunna begged
to be taken along. Leif asked if this would be agreeable
to her family, but she said that made no difference. Leif,
however, refused to carry off a woman of her high rank in

The Saga of V inland 1 3

a strange country where, as he said, " we are so few in
number/'

" Some day," said Thorgunna, " you may regret that
you chose this course/'

" I shall have to risk that," retorted Leif.

" Then I will tell you/' said Thorgunna, " that I am no
longer alone; I am with child, and I say that it is your
doing. I also know that I shall bear a boy when the time
comes. And even though you pay no attention to me now,
I shall bring him up and send him to you in Greenland, as
soon as he can travel with other men. But I predict that he
will give you no more joy than you deserve from this part-
ing with me. More than that, I intend to see Greenland
myself before the end comes/'

When he left, Leif gave her a gold ring, a homespun
Greenland mantle, and a belt of walrus-tusk. Later on, the
boy did come to Greenland, and he was named Thorgils.
Leif accepted him as his son, and after that the boy stayed
in Greenland, but to the very end there was something un-
canny about him.

Leif now sailed away from the Hebrides and got to Nor-
way by fall. He sought the court of King Olaf Trygvason,
and entered his service. The king showed Leif great favor,
for it seemed to him that Leif was a fine, well-bred man.

One time he called Leif in and asked him, " Are you
planning to sail out to Greenland this summer? "

" I am," answered Leif, "if it is not against your
will/'

" Indeed," said the king, " I am anxious that you should.
You shall go with a special mission from me: to proclaim
Christianity in Greenland/' Leif said he would do as the
king wished, but added that it might not be an easy mission
to accomplish in Greenland. The king insisted, however,
that he knew no man better fitted for it than Leif.

14 Voyages to Vinland

" And I am confident/' he added, " that fortune will
smile on you."

" That will only be/' said Leif, " if your good luck is
added to mine/'

A D Leif sailed as soon as he could get ready, and was blown
IOOO around a great deal He hit upon countries he had not ex-
pected to see. There he found self-sown wheat fields and
grapevines, and a tree called " mosur " [possibly bird's-
eye maple], and he brought with him samples of all these.
Some of the timber was big enough to use in building
houses. Leif found some shipwrecked men and took them
home with him and gave them all lodgings for the winter.
He showed so noble and generous a nature in bringing
Christianity to Greenland and in rescuing these men
that after this he was called Leif the Lucky.

Leif landed in Ericsfjord and made his way home to
Brattahlid, where he was well received. He set out at once
to preach Christianity and the Catholic faith. He showed
men the tokens of King Olaf 's mission and told them how
much glory and magnificence followed this faith. Eric was
very reluctant about giving up his old beliefs. But his wife
Thjodhild quickly went over to Christianity and had a
church built some distance from their home. The church
was named Thjodhild's church after her. There she used
to say her prayers, along with all the rest who accepted the
faith, and they were many. Thjodhild refused to have in-
tercourse with Eric after she was converted, and this he
took greatly to heart.

Eric grumbled that the one of Leif s deeds offset the
other: he had rescued a ship's crew and saved their lives;
but he had also brought this " faker" to Greenland
that was his name for the priest. Yet Leif 's urging and per-
suasion brought about the baptism of Eric an4 all the
people of Greenland.

LEIF ERICSON SAILS OFF TO EXPLORE THE
LANDS SEEN BY BJARNI

Chapter IV

FROM THE GREENLAND SAGA

LEIF ERIGSON EXPLORES
VINLAND

People in Greenland were now eagerly talking about ex-
ploring the lands that had been seen. Leif Ericson made
a visit to Bjarni Herjulfson and bought a ship from him.
Then he gathered a crew of thirty-five men and asked his
father Eric to lead the expedition. But Eric held back.
" I am getting along in years/ 1 he said, " and I am less
able, to put up with such hardships than I used to be."

But Leif insisted that he was still the ablest and the
luckiest of his clan, and gradually he talked Eric into con-
senting. When they were ready, Eric rode from home, and
got almost down to the ship. Then the horse he was riding
stumbled, so he fell off and hurt his foot. Eric then said,
" It seems that I am not fated to find other lands than the
one in which we are now living. We shall ride no farther
together." Eric returned to Brattahlid, while Leif went
down to the ship with his thirty-five companions. One of
them was a German by the name of Tyrker.

They fitted out the ship and sailed away. The first coun-
try they found was the one that Bjarni had seen last Here
they sailed to shore and* dropped anchor, put out a boat
and went on land. They saw no grass, the mountain tops

18 Voyages to V inland

were covered with glaciers, and from sea to mountain the
country was like one slab of rock. It looked to be a barren,
unprofitable country. Then Leif remarked, " Now at
least we have done better than Bjarni, who never even
set foot on these shores! I am going to give the country a
name, and I shall call it Helluland [the land of flat rocks]/'

They went on board and sailed out to sea once more.
They found a second country, and again they dropped
anchor, put out a boat, and went ashore. This country
was level and wooded, with broad white beaches wher-
ever they went, and a gently sloping shoreline. Leif said,
" I shall give this country a name that fits with its natural
character and call it Markland [forest land]." Then they
hurried back to their ships and sailed on with a north-
east breeze.

After two days' sail they sighted another shore and
landed on an island to the north of the mainland. It was a
fine, bright day, and as they looked around, they discov-
ered dew on the grass. It so happened that they picked up
some of the dew in their hands and tasted of it, and it
seemed to them that they had never tasted anything so^
sweet. Then they returned to the ship and sailed through
the channel between the island and a cape jutting out to
the north of the mainland.

They steered a westerly course past the cape and found
great shallows at ebb tide, so that their ship was beached
and lay some distance from the sea. But they were so
eager to go ashore that they could not bear to wait till the
tide rose under their ship. They ran up on the shore to a
place where a stream flowed out of a lake. As soon as the
sea rose under their ship, they took a boat and rowed out
to it, and moved it up the river into the lake, where they
cast anchor. Then they took their leather hammocks
ashore and built themselves shelters. Later they decided

ERIC THE RED FALLS FROM

HIS HORSE

The Saga of V inland 21

to stay there through the winter and set up large houses.

There was no lack of salmon either in the river or in
the lake, and it was bigger salmon than they had ever seen.
Nature was so generous here that it seemed to them no
cattle would need any winter fodder, but could graze out-
doors. There was no frost in winter, and the grass hardly
withered. The days and nights were more nearly equal
than in Greenland or Iceland, and on the shortest day of
the year the sun was up from breakfast time to midafter-
noon [as it was not in Iceland after the middle of October].

When they had finished building their houses, Leif said
to his companions, " Now I am going to divide our com-
pany into two groups, for I want to get this country ex-
plored. Half the men will stay here at the camp, while the
other half goes exploring. They shall not go so far that they
cannot get back home by evening, and they shall stay to-
gether/' So for a time they did this, and sometimes Leif
went along with the exploring party and sometimes he
stayed at home. Leif was a big, strapping fellow, hand-
some to look at, thoughtful and temperate in all things.

One evening the news spread that a member of the
crew was missing, none other than Tyrker the German.
Leif was much disturbed at this, for Tyrker had lived in
their household a long time and had been greatly
devoted to Leif when he was a child. Leif angrily re-
proached his men, and made ready to start off with a
search party of twelve. They had scarcely left the house
when Tyrker came walking towards them, and he was re-
ceived with great joy. Leif saw at once that his foster
father was in high spirits. Tyrker was a short fellow,
rather puny looking, with a prominent forehead and rest-
less eyes in a smallish face; but he was handy at all sorts
of craftsmanship.

Leif said to him, " Why were you so late, foster father,

22 Voyages to Vinland

and how did you get parted from your company? " Tyrker
first talked a long time in German, rolled his eyes and
made faces. They did not understand a word he said.
After a while he changed over and spoke Norse.

" I did not go very far beyond the rest of you, and yet
I have some real news for you. I found grape vines and
grapes! "

" Is this really true, foster father mine? " said Leif.

" Certainly it is true/' he answered, " for I was born
where there is no lack either of vines or grapes/'

Now they slept that night, but the next morning Leif
told his crew, " From now on we have two jobs on our
hands. On one day we shall gather grapes, and on the next
we shall cut grape vines and chop down the trees to make
a cargo for my ship/'

So they followed this plan, and it is said that they loaded
up the afterboat with grapes, and the ship itself with a
cargo of timber. When spring came, they made the ship
ready and sailed away. Leif gave this country a name to
suit its resources: he called it Vinland [wine land].

After this they sailed out to sea with favorable winds,
until they hove in sight of Greenland and its ice-capped
mountains. Then one of the crew spoke up and asked Leif,
" Why do you steer the ship so much into the wind? "

" I am watching the course/' answered Leif, " but I can
also see something else. Do you notice anything out oj^ the
ordinary? " They answered that they saw nothing worth
talking about.

" I wonder," said Leif, " if the thing I see is a ship or a
reef/'

Then they saw it, and said that it must be a reef. But
Leif s eyes were so much keener than theirs that he could
see men on the reef.

" Now/' said Leif, " we shall steer into the wind, so that

TYRKER THE GERMAN
FINDS GRAPES

The Saga of Vinland 25

we can help these men if they need it. If they should
happen to be unfriendly, we have the upper hand and
not they/'

They sailed in by the reef, lowered their sail, cast an-
chor, and launched a little boat they had with them.
Tyrker asked the men, " Who is your chief? " One of them
spoke up, " My name is Thori, and I am of Norse stock.
But what is your name? "

Leif told him.

" Are you the son of Eric the Red of Brattahlid? "
said he.

" I am/' said Leif, " and now I wish to invite you all on
board my ship, and you may take as much of your goods
as the ship will hold/'

They accepted his offer and sailed with their cargo to
Ericsfjord. They landed at Brattahlid, and here they un-
loaded the ship. Leif asked Thori and his wife Gudrid
and three of the men to make their home with him, and
he found lodgings elsewhere for the rest of the crew,
both Thori's men and his own. Leif rescued fifteen per-
sons from the reef.

So Leif grew in wealth and honor. But that winter there
was much sickness among Thori's men, and Thori him-
self died, together with a large part of his crew.

Chapter V

FROM THE GREENLAND SAGA

THORVALD ERIGSON GOES
EXPLORING

People kept talking a great deal about Leif s voyage to
Vinland, and his brother Thorvald maintained that the
country was still too scantily explored. Leif spoke to him
and said, " If you are burning to see Vinland, brother,
you are welcome to my ship. But first I should like to
send the ship to fetch the timber that Thori had on the
reef." This was done.

A ) Then Thorvald got ready for the voyage with a crew of
1004- ^frty men consulting all the time with his brother Leif.
They fixed up the ship and sailed away, and nothing is
reported to have happened before they got to Vinland.
At Leif s camp they laid up their ship and spent the win-
ter, getting their food by fishing.

^ j) In the spring Thorvald told his men to get the ship
TOO C rca( ty. He sent some of them out with the afterboat and
asked them to spend the summer exploring the coast to
the west. They found that it was a lovely, wooded country,
and that the woods ran almost down to the sea, with a
white, sandy beach. The sea was full of islands and great
shallows. Nowhere did they find any vestiges of men or
animals, except a wooden granary on one of the islands to

LEIF RESCUES FIFTEEN PERSONS FROM A REEF

The Saga of Vinland 29

the west. They found no other human product, and in the
fall they turned back to Leif s camp.

In the second summer Thorvald sailed his vessel east- A T\
ward and along the coast to the north. As they were round- T no A
ing a certain cape, a stiff storm fell upon them and drove
them on shore, so that their keel was broken and they had
to stay there a long time while they repaired the ship.
Then Thorvald said to his men, " I wish we might raise
up the keel on this cape and call the cape Keelness," and
so they did.

Then they sailed along the coast to the east, into some
nearby fjord mouths, and headed for a jutting cape that
rose high out of the sea and was all covered with woods.
Here they anchored the ship and laid down a gangplank
to the shore. Thorvald went ashore with all his company.
Then he said, " This is beautiful, and here I should like
to build me a home."

After a time they went back to the ship. Then they
caught sight of three little mounds on the sand farther in
on the cape. When they got closer to them, they saw three
skin-covered boats, with three men under each. They split
up their force and seized all the men but one, who escaped
in his boat. They killed all eight of them, and then re-
turned to the cape. Here they saw a number of mounds
in the fjord and guessed that these must be human dwell-
ing places.

After that such a drowsiness fell upon them that they
simply could not stay awake, and they all fell asleep. Then
a voice cried out to them, so that they all awoke, and this
is what the voice said, " Wake up, Thorvald, and all your
crew, if you value your lives! Get aboard the ship with
your men and hurry away from this country with all
speed! " A host of boats was then heading towards them
from the inner end of the fjord. Thorvald then said, " We

jo Voyages to Vinland

shall set up our breastworks on both sides of the ship and
defend ourselves as best we can, but do as little killing as
possible/' So they did, and after the savages had shot at
them for a while, they hurried away as fast as they could.

Thorvald asked if any of his men were wounded. They
said they were not.

" I have got a wound under my arm/' he said; " an
arrow flew between the gunwale and my shield and struck
me under the arm, and here is the arrow. This will be the
last of me. Now I advise you to make ready for your re-
turn as quickly as possible. But me you shall take back to
that cape which I found so inviting. It looks as if I spoke
the truth without knowing it when I said that I might live
there some day! Bury me there with a cross at my head
and another at my feet, and ever after you shall call it
Crossness/'

So Thorvald died and they did everything just as he had

told them. Then they came back to their companions and

exchanged news about all that had happened. They spent

the winter there and gathered grapes and vines for the

ship. The next spring they sailed back to Greenland and

A D steered the ship into Ericsfjord and had plenty of news

1007 totellLeif.

DEATH OF THORVALD ERIGSON

Chapter VI

FROM THE KARLSEVNI SAGA

THORBJORN AND GUDRID
EMIGRATE

Thorbjorn was the name of an Icelandic chief, who had
a great estate and was held in the highest honor. He had
a daughter named Gudrid, who was the loveliest of women
and noble in every trait.

A man named Orm, who lived at Arnarstapi and was
married to Halldis, was a great friend of Thorbjorn's. He
was an excellent farmer, and for a long time Gudrid was
brought up in his household.

There was a rich man named Thorgeir, who once had
been a slave, and now lived at Thorgeir's Fell. He had a
son Einar, who was a handsome, manly fellow, and quite
fond of showy clothes. Einar used to sail on trading ex-
peditions and prospered in this business; he spent his win-
ters alternately in Iceland and Norway. One fall Einar
was selling off a cargo of his on Snowfellsness in Iceland
and came to Orm's home at Arnarstapi. Orm invited him
to stay there, and Einar accepted, for they were good
friends. Einar 's wares were carried into one of the store-
houses, and there Einar unpacked them and showed them
to Orm and his household.

He offered Orm anything he wanted, and Orm ac-

34 Voyages to Vinland

cepted, saying that Einar was a fine merchant and a man
of good fortune.

Just as they were busy with the wares, a woman walked
past the storehouse door. Einar asked Orm who the beau-
tiful woman was that had walked past the door "I have
never seen her here before/*

" That/' replied Orm, " is Gudrid, my foster child; she
is a daughter of Thorbjorn, the chief of Laugarbrekka/*

" She would be a fine match for me/' said Einar. " Or
has she already been spoken for? "

" Plenty of men have asked for her, my friend/' an-
swered Orm, " but she is not to be had for the asking. It
looks as if both she and her father were pretty particular/*

" Be that as it may/' said Einar, " she is the woman I
intend to ask for, and I wish that you would plead -my
cause with her father. If you will go to this trouble for
my sake, I shall reward you with my devoted friendship.
Thorbjorn will surely see the advantage in tying up with
us; for he has a high standing and a fine estate, but they
tell me that his other assets are slipping away. Now my
father and I have plenty of land and goods, and it would
be a great help to Thorbjorn if he would accept this plan/ 1

" I certainly consider myself a friend of yours/' replied
Orm, " but I do not look forward to broaching this idea to
Thorbjorn he is a proud man and a hot-tempered one,
too/'

But Einar insisted that he make the proposal, and at
length Orm agreed to do as he wished. Then Einar went
back south to his home.

Some time after this, Thorbjorn held a great harvest
festival, as was his custom, for he was a princely sort of
man. Orm of Arnarstapi was asked there, along with many
other friends of Thorbjorn's. Orm got to talking with
Thorbjorn and told him that he had lately been visited

THE BURIAL OF THORVALD AT CROSSNESS

The Saga of Vinland 37

by Einar of Thorgeir's Fell and that Einar was a promis-
ing young man. He then made the proposal on Einar's
behalf and said that there were many reasons why he
should accept the offer. " It would help you out of your
difficulties."

Thorbjorn answered, " I had not expected to hear such
words from you, that I should marry my daughter to the
son of a slave. Now that you think my wealth is waning,
you can give me such advice as this. But she shall no
longer stay with you, who have found her worthy of so
mean a marriage/'

Orm and the other guests went back to their homes.
But that winter Gudrid stayed at home with her father.
In the spring Thorbjorn again gave a grand feast for his
friends; many people came, and it was a great party. One
day at the feast Thorbjorn asked them to listen, and then
he spoke these words: " I have lived here a whole lifetime;
I have many proofs of the love and good will of men
towards me, and it seems to me that our dealings have
been good. But now things are taking a turn for the worse,
because my fortune is running low, though people have
never scorned me before. Now I will rather break up my
home than blemish my honor; I will rather leave the
country than disgrace my family. So I have decided to
accept the proposal that my friend Eric the Red made
when we parted in Broadf jord. I plan to leave for Green-
land this summer, if things go as I wish."

This speech caused a great sensation, for Thorbjorn
had many friends; but they realized that he had only an-
nounced the plan when his mind was fully made up, and
that there was no use in trying to change it. Thorbjorn
gave gifts to his guests, and soon the party broke up, with
the men returning to their homes.

Thorbjorn sold his land and bought a ship that was

58 Voyages to Vinland

lying at the mouth of Hraunhofn [Lava Harbor]. Thirty
A D men made ready to sail with him, and among them Orm
099 of Arnarstapi and his wife, as well as others of Thorbjorn's
friends who did not wish to part from him. So they put
out to sea, and at first the weather favored them. But on
the high seas the good winds died down, a fearful storm
broke upon them, and they were tossed around all sum-
mer. Besides, many of them fell sick, and half the com-
pany died, including Orm and his wife Halldis. The seas
were rough, and the men had to bear all sorts of misery
and distress. In spite of this they managed to make
Herjulfsness in Greenland by the opening of winter
[October 14]. A man named Thorkel was living on Her-
julfsness at this time, a fine, enterprising farmer. He re-
ceived Thorbjorn and all his men and entertained them
royally throughout the winter. Thorbjorn and his men
enjoyed themselves here and were well satisfied.

Chapter VII

FROM THE KARLSEVNI SAGA

GUDRID AND THE WITCH

It so happened that this was a bad year in Greenland, for
the men who had gone fishing had made a poor haul and
some had not even returned. There was a woman in the
settlement named Thorbjorg, who was a fortune teller
and was called the Little Witch. She had had nine sisters,
all of them wise women, and she alone was alive. It was
her custom to visit around among the farmers, and people
invited her to their homes, especially those who were
eager to know what the future had in store for them or
what the season would be like. Since Thorkel was the lead-
ing man in this community, people felt that it was his
duty to find out when their troubles were going to let up.
Thorkel invited the witch woman to his home and pre-
pared a fine welcome for her, as was the custom when
such women were received. A special seat of honor was
made ready for her, and a cushion laid in it, filled with
chicken feathers.

A man was sent to fetch her. When he brought her back
that evening, she was dressed in a dark-blue mantle,
clasped together with a strap, and set with precious stones
all the way down to the hem. She wore a necklace of glass
beads, and on her head a black lambskin hood, lined with
white catskin. She carried a staff with a knob on top, orna-

A Voyages to Vinland

merited with brass and set with stones on top of the knob.
Around her waist she wore a belt made of tinderwood,
with a large leather bag hanging from it. In this bag she
kept the charms that she needed for her witchcraft. On
her feet she wore shaggy calfskin shoes, and the laces
were long, heavy leather thongs with big brass buttons on
the ends. On her hands she wore catskin gloves, which
were white and furry on the inside.

When she came in, everyone felt that it was proper to
greet her as courteously as possible, and she responded to
each as she found them agreeable to her. Thorkel, as head
of the house, took the witch woman by the hand and led
her to the seat that had been prepared for her. Then he
asked her to cast her eyes over home and herd and house-
hold; but she was very silent about it all.

In the evening tables were set up, and something must
be said about the meal that was prepared for the witch
woman. A porridge of goat's milk was made for her, and
she was served meat from the hearts of every kind of ani-
mal they had there. She used a brass spoon and a knife
with a handle of walrus tusk that was fastened on by a
double ring of copper; the point of it was broken. When
the tables were taken away, Thorkel went before Thor-
bjorg and asked her how she liked the household and the
behavior of the people, and how soon she would be able
to tell him what he had asked about and everyone wanted
to know. She said that she could give no answer before
morning, after she had slept there that night.

The next day they began to make the necessary prepa-
rations for carrying on her witchcraft. She asked to have
with her some women who knew the old magic song called
Warlocks, which was needed for the ritual. But there
seemed to be no such women. They hunted around the
farm, to see if any one knew it, and then Gudrid spoke

GUDRID SINGS THE MAGIC SONGS FOR
THORBJORG THE WITCH

The Saga of Vinland 43

up, " I am no witch woman, nor am I skilled in any kind
of witchcraft, but Halldis my foster mother in Iceland
taught me the lore that she called Warlocks/'

Thorkel answered, " You are lucky to have learned it! "

" But this/' said Gudrid, " is secret lore of a kind that
I will have no part in, for I am a Christian woman."

" By giving us your help/' said Thorbjorg, " you might
very well do the people hereabouts a great service and
yet be none the worse for it. But I trust that Thorkel will
be able to persuade you/'

Thorkel urged Gudrid to consent, and she finally
agreed to do as he wished. The women then formed a
circle around Thorbjorg, who sat on the magic platform.
Gudrid recited the charm so well and so beautifully that
none of them could remember having heard it done with
finer expression. The witch woman thanked her for the
song and said that many spirits had been attracted to the
place and had been charmed by her recital, spirits who be-
fore had turned away and refused to show submission.
" Now," she said, " many things are clear as daylight,
which before were hidden both to me and others. For one
thing, I know now that this bad season will only last the
winter, and that things will get better in the spring. The
pest that has been harassing you will vanish sooner than
you expect. And as for you, Gudrid, I am going to reward
you at once for the help you have given us, for your
future lies clear before me. You will make a distinguished
match here in Greenland, though the marriage will not
be a long-lasting one, for your paths lead back to Iceland,
and there you will become the mother of a great and
good line and over your family tree will shine a brighter
ray of light than I have the power to tell you. But now I
bid you farewell and good luck, my daughter/'

After this, people crowded around the witch woman

44 Voyages to Vinland

and each one asked about the things he most wanted to
know. She was ready and willing to answer them, and not
much of what she told them failed to come true. The
people on another farm had already sent for her, and so
she went there. Then they sent for Thorbjorn to return,
for he had refused to stay home while such heathendom
was being practised.

As soon as spring came, the weather got better, as Thor-

bjorg had said it would. Thorbjorn got his ship ready and

sailed to Brattahlid. Eric received him with open arms

and said it was well that he had come. Thorbjorn and his

household lived with Eric that winter, while his crew

A D lodged with the neighbors. The next spring Eric gave him

I OOO land at Stockness, where Thorbjorn built himself a goodly

farm and lived forever after.

Chapter VIII

FROM THE KARLSEVNI SAGA AND
THE GREENLAND SAGA*

THORSTEIN ERIGSON LOOKS
FOR VINLAM)

Next it is to be told that Thorstein Ericson asked for the A D
hand of Gudrid, Thorbjorn's daughter. He was a good
man, wise and friendly, and his proposal was well re-
ceived, both by Gudrid and her father Thorbjorn. It was
decided that they should be married, and the wedding was
arranged at Brattahlid in the fall. It was a great festival
and there were many guests. Gudrid was a fine-looking,
intelligent woman, with a gracious manner toward
strangers.

Thorstein was eager to explore the lands that his brother
Leif had found; according to the Greenland Saga, he also
wanted to bring back the body of his brother Thorvald.
He rigged up the ship that Thorvald had sailed in and A D
picked out a crew that was notable for strength and stat- Tnn Q
ure. With twenty-five men and Gudrid his wife he set
sail as soon as they were ready. But they were tossed around
all summer and never found the course they were looking
for. They got within sight of Iceland, and they saw birds
from the Irish coast. In the fall they got back to Green-
land, weary and battered, reaching Ericsfjord just a week
before the beginning of winter.

46 Voyages to Vinland

Then Eric spoke these words, " You were more cheer
ul this summer, when you sailed out of the fjord, than
you are now; and yet things might be much worse! "
Thorstein replied, " You will show your true princely
spirit now, if you look after the homeless members of my
crew and see that they are well taken care of." So all those
who had no place to go went home to Eric's farm.

Thorstein owned a half share in a farm in Lysuf jord,
the southernmost fjord of the Western Settlement. The
other half was owned by a man who also was named Thor-
stein, and often called " the Black "; his wife's name was
Sigrid. Thorstein and Gudrid made a visit to these peo-
ple in Lysufjord. They were given a good welcome and
stayed there that winter.

Early in the winter a disease began to ravage Thorstein
Ericson's crew, and many of his men died. Thorstein
asked that coffins be made for those who died, and the
bodies brought aboard his ship. " For I intend," he said,
" to have all the dead removed to Ericsf jord next summer."

But it was not long before the plague struck Thorstein's
own household. First Sigrid, mistress of the house, fell
sick; she was a very big woman and as powerful as a man,
but the plague struck her down just the same. Shortly
after that the disease seized Thorstein Ericson, so that
they both lay sick at the same time. When Sigrid died,
Thorstein got up and went out of the house to find a
plank to lay the body on. Gudrid then said, " Don't stay
away long, Thorstein mine/' He said he would not. Then
Thorstein exclaimed, " Our hostess is carrying on most
strangely, for she is trying to get up on her elbow and is
sticking her foot over the edge of the bed and fumbling
for her shoes."

Just then the other Thorstein came in, and Sigrid lay
down with a crash so that every beam in the house shook.

The Saga of V inland 47

Now Thorstein made a coffin for Sigrid's body, took it
away, and buried it. He was a big man and a strong one,
but it took all the strength he had to get her off the farm.

Now Thorstein Ericson's illness got worse, and he died,
to the great distress of his wife Gudrid. They were all
sitting together in the room, with Gudrid on a chair be-
fore the bench where her husband was lying. Then the
other Thorstein lifted Gudrid off the chair on to his lap
and sat down with her on a bench opposite her dead hus-
band. He spoke gently with her and tried to comfort her;
he promised her that he would take her to Ericsfjord with
her husband's body and those of his companions. " Also,"
he said, " I shall bring more servants here to wait on you
and amuse you/' She thanked him for this.

Thorstein Ericson sat up and cried, " Where is Gud-
rid? " He said it three times, but she did not answer. Then
she asked the other Thorstein, " Shall I answer him or
not? " He told her to say nothing. Then he walked across
the floor to the chair and sat down on it, again taking
Gudrid on his lap. Then he said to the dead man, " What
do you want, namesake? "

After a pause Thorstein Ericson replied, " I feel an
urge to tell Gudrid her coming fate, so that she will not
take my death too hard, for I have come to a good resting
place." He then went on to foretell those events which are
recounted in the rest of this saga. He was seen to drop a
tear and whisper some words in Gudrid's ear that only
she could hear. Then he said aloud that those men were
blessed who kept their Christian faith, for with it went
grace and comfort; but there were many who kept it
badly.

" It is a shameful custom," said he, " which people
have followed here in Greenland since they took over
Christianity that they bury men in unconsecrated

48 Voyages to Vinland

ground with just a little singing over them. I want to be
removed to the church along with those o my crew who
have died/' It had become the custom in Greenland to
bury men on the farms where they died. They were put
down in unconsecrated soil, with a pole thrust down as far
as the breast of the corpse. When the clergy arrived, the
pole was pulled up, and holy water poured down the
opening. Then a service was sung over the dead, though
It might be a long time after their burial.

Thorstein told Gudrid she could look forward to a
bright future. He advised her not to marry a Greenlander.
He asked her to give their property to the church or to
the poor, and then he fell back a second time.

A T\ Thorstein the Black carried out all that he had prom-
ised Gudrid. He sold his land and his cattle in the spring

IOO 9 and sailed with her and all his goods to Ericsfjord. The
dead were buried in the churchyard. Gudrid went to live
in Leif's household at Brattahlid, while Thorstein the
Black got himself a farm in Ericsfjord and lived there the
rest of his life, honored and respected by all.

THORSTEIN ERICSON FORETELLS THE FUTURE
OF GUDRID

Chapter IX

FROM THE KARLSEVNI SAGA

KARLSEVNI AND GUDRID
ARE MARRIED

There was a man named Thorfinn Karlsevni [the promis-
ing], a son of Thord Horsehead, who lived in the north of
Iceland at Reyniness in Skagafjord. Karlsevni was a man
of good stock and very well-to-do. His mother's name was
Thorunn. He used to sail on trading voyages and was con-
sidered a successful merchant.

One summer he made his ship ready with the idea of AD
sailing to Greenland. Snorri, a son of Thorbrand from
Alptafjord, joined him, and together they had a crew of
forty men. That same summer two other men, Bjarni
Grimolfson from Broadfjord and Thorhall Gamlason
from Eastfjord, also fitted out a ship to sail to Greenland
with forty men on board.

Bom ships sailed out to sea as soon as they were ready.
We are not told how long they were at sea, but in the
fall they both arrived in Ericsfjord. Eric and other settlers
rode down to the ships to meet them, and at once began
bartering for the goods they had brought. The skippers
told Eric to help himself to all he wanted of the wares.
Eric showed his generosity in turn by inviting all the men

52 Voyages to Vinland

to Brattahlid for the winter. The traders thanked Eric
for the offer and went home with him. Later their wares
were carried to Brattahlid, where there was no lack of fine,
roomy outhouses to store them in.

The traders had a merry time of it at Eric's place that
winter. But as it drew toward Christmas, Eric became
silent and moody, very different from his usual cheerful
self. One day Karlsevni got to talking with him and said,
*' Are you troubled about something, Eric? It strikes us
that you are rather less cheerful than you have been. You
are treating us so royally here that we owe you whatever
returns we can give. Now tell me what makes you so
gloomy/'

Eric replied, " You are fine, courteous guests, and noth-
ing is farther from my thoughts than any unpleasantness
between us. It is simply that I should feel deeply shamed
if it came to be said that you had never had so bad a
Christmas as the one you spent at Eric the Red's in Green-
land."

" There is no need of that/' answered Karlsevni. " On
our ships we have malt and flour and grain, and you are
welcome to take as much as you wish, and hold whatever
kind of celebration your generosity may dictate/'

Eric accepted the offer and made ready for the Christ-
mas feast, and it turned out so magnificently that people
could hardly recall a better one in a poor country.

After Christmas Karlsevni asked Eric for Gudrid's
hand, since it appeared that Eric had the legal right to
marry her off. Eric answered that he would be glad to
advance his cause, and he added that she deserved to be
well married. " She will have to follow the fate that is cut
out for her, and we have heard nothing but good about
you/ 1 Tlje question was then put up to her, and she said

The Saga of V inland 53

that her wishes agreed wholly with Eric's. They wasted no
time carrying out the plan, and extended the Christmas
feast into a wedding party. It was a jolly winter in Bratta-
hlid that year, with much chess-playing, saga-telling, and
everything that might contribute to their good cheer.

Chapter X

FROM THE KARLSEVNI SAGA

KARLSEVNI LEADS AN
EXPEDITION

There was great discussion at Brattahlid that winter about

going in search of Vinland the Good, for it was agreed

that the country must have valuable resources. For this

reason Karlsevni and Snorri decided to go exploring in

A D the spring. Bjarni and Thorhall, who were mentioned

1 010 above, made ready to join them with their ship and the

crew they had brought from Iceland.

There was a man named Thorvard, who was married
to Freydis, an illegitimate daughter of Eric's. He also de-
cided to go along. With him came Thorhall, who was
nicknamed " The Hunter." He and Eric used to go hunt-
ing and fishing together in the summer, while in the
winter he was Eric's overseer and trusted man. He was
huge of stature, dark and glowering, rather beyond mid-
dle age; he was a hard man to get along with, mostly taci-
turn, but also abusive and underhanded, and he was a
bad adviser to Eric. He had refused to adopt the new faith
when it came to Greenland. He had few friends, but Eric
had a high regard for him, and he was taken on the voyage
because he was acquainted far and wide with the unsettled
regions of the country. They sailed the ship that Thor-

THE SCOTTISH RUNNERS HAKI
AND HEKJA

The Saga of V inland 57

bjorn, GudricTs father, had brought out from Iceland,
and most of the men aboard were Greenlanders.

Altogether there were a hundred and sixty men aboard
the three ships. They sailed first to the Western Settle-
ment and then out to Bear Isles. From there they sailed for
two days with a northerly wind before they sighted land.
They rowed to shore in their boats and explored the coun-
try; here they found huge slabs of stone, many of them
twenty-four feet across [the Greenland Saga says that two
men could easily lie outstretched on them with their soles
touching]. They saw many arctic foxes there. They named
the country Helluland [the land of flat rocks]. Then they
sailed for two days more, with their course turning from
south to southeast, and reached a land with great forests
and many animals. Off the shore to the southeast lay an
island, and here they killed a bear. For this reason they
called it Bear Island, while they named the country itself
Markland [forest land] because of the woods.

Then they sailed a long time along the coast and came
upon a cape. They tacked along the coast, which was on
their starboard. It was ar^ unfriendly shoreline, with long,
sandy beaches. They put out their boats and rowed ashore.
On the cape they found the keel of a ship, and so they
called it Keelness. The sandy beaches they called Wonder-
strands, because it took so long to sail past them. Then the
coast grew more indented with bays, and they steered the
ship into one of these.

When Leif Ericson had been at the court of Olaf Tryg-
vason, and King Olaf had asked him to proclaim Chris-
tianity in Greenland, he had given Leif two Scottish
[Gaelic] people, a man named Haki and a woman named
Hekja. The king suggested that if he needed speed, he
might use them, for they were swifter than deer. Leif and
Eric had turned them over to Karlsevni for the voyage.

eg Voyages to V inland

When they had sailed past Wonderstrands, they landed the
Scots and told them to run southwards and see what the
country had to offer, but to return before three days were
past. They were dressed in garments which they called
" kjafal " [Irish cabhail]. These were made with a hood
on top, were open on the sides, sleeveless, and fastened
between the legs with a button and a loop. Otherwise the
Scots were naked.

They cast anchor and lay there in the meanwhile. When
three days had passed, the Scots came running down to the
shore. One of them bore a bunch of grapes in his hand,
the other an ear of wild wheat. Karlsevni declared that
they seemed to have found a country rich in resources, and
took them back on board. Then they all sailed away on
their course, until they reached a place where the shore-
line was broken by a fjord, and into this fjord they headed
their ships. At the mouth lay an island, washed by swift
ocean currents; this they called Stream Isle. There were
so many eider-ducks there that it was hardly possible to
step between the eggs. They steered into the fjord and
called it Streamfjord.

Here they unloaded their cargoes and set up a camp.
They had brought along all kinds of livestock, and now
they turned them out to graze in the tall grass. There were
mountains there, and the country was beautiful to see. The
men spent all their time exploring. They stayed through-
out the winter, which turned out to be a severe one. They
had not provided for it during the summer, and so they
ran short of food, and had trouble finding any game or
fish.

They went out to the island in the hope that something
would turn up either wild life or flotsam from the sea.
But there was little that one could eat, even though their
cattle were getting along fine. Then they prayed to God,

FISH ARE CAUGHT IN PITS AT
HIGH TIDE

The Saga of Vinland 61

and asked that He send them some food, but their prayers
were not answered as quickly as they had need of. Mean-
while Thorhall the Hunter disappeared and the men made
a search for him, keeping it up for three days. On the
fourth day Karlsevni and Bjarni found him on top of an
overhanging cliff. He was staring up in the air, with his
eyes and mouth and nostrils wide open, while he scratched
and pinched himself, and mumbled something. They
asked why he had gone there. He told them it was none
of their business, that they had better not bother about
his actions, and that he had lived long enough so he needed
no advice from them.

They told him to come home with them, and he did so.
Soon afterwards a whale drifted in, and the men rushed at
it and cut it up, but they did not know what kind of whale
this was. Even Karlsevni, who was an expert on whales,
could not make out what kind it was. When the cooks had
boiled the whalemeat, they ate some of it; but all of them
got sick from it. Then Thorhall walked over and said to
them, " Isn't it so that the Redbearded One turned out
to be stronger than your Christ? This is my reward for
the poetry I made about my trusty friend Thor; he has
rarely failed me/' When the men learned this, none of
them would touch the meat, and they threw it over a cliff
into the sea. They uplifted their voices and asked for the
mercy of God. Then the weather got better, so they could
row out to sea, and now they were able to find plenty of
food. In the spring they went back to Streamfjord and
gathered supplies along the shore. There was game on the
mainland, birds' nests on the island, and fish in the sea.

Now they began to discuss the future course of their
journey. Thorhall the Hunter wanted to sail north of
Wonderstrands past Keelness and look for Vinland in this
direction, while Karlsevni wanted to sail southward along

62 Voyages to Vinland

the coast and to the east of it, for there seemed to be better
land the farther south they got, and it seemed to him more
advisable to explore in both directions. Thorhall rigged
up his ship off the island, but only nine men went with
him. All the rest joined Karlsevni. One day, as Thorhall
was carrying water on board his ship, he took a drink and
recited this verse:

Warrior friends so brave
promised me so much;
best of drinks I'd get
in this repulsive land.
Yet here you see me now,
creeping to the spring,
swinging a water pail;
no wine has touched my lips.

After this they sailed away, and Karlsevni followed
them out to the island. Before they hoisted sail, Thorhall
recited another ditty:

Let's be off for home,
steer across the waves,
cleave the ocean paths,
back to our countrymen.
Let the restless stay,
all who praise this land;
let them sit and cook
their whales on Wonderstrand.

Then they parted company, and Thorhall and his crew
sailed to the north past Wonderstrands and Keelness.
There they tried to tack to the west, but a storm struck
them and blew them east as far as Ireland. Here they were
beaten up and thrown into slavery, and Thorhall lost his
life, according to stories told by traders.

Karlsevni sailed south along the coast with Snorri,

THE SKRAELINGS EXCHANGE FURS
FOR STRIPS OF CLOTH

The Saga of V r inland 65

Bjarni, and the rest. After a long while they came to a
stream that first ran down into a lake, and then into the
sea. There were great sandbars outside the river mouth,
and they could only enter the stream at high tide. Karls-
evni then sailed into the river mouth and named the
country Hop, because that was the Norse word for a small,
landlocked bay. Here they found self-sown wheat fields in
the lowlands, and grapevines wherever there were hills.
Every creek was full of fish. They dug pits at the point
where land and sea met at high tide, and when the tide
went out, there were halibut in the pits. The woods teemed
with all kinds of animals. For half a month they stayed
there and enjoyed themselves, without being aware of any
dangers. They had their livestock with them.

Chapter XI

FROM THE KARLSEVNI SAGA

KARLSEVNI MEETS THE

NATIVES

Early one morning, as they were looking around, they
caught sight of a great many skin-covered boats. The men
in the boats were waving wooden sticks at the ships, and
they were waving them in a sunwise direction. It sounded
very much as if they were threshing grain. Then Karlsevni
exclaimed, " What can this mean? "

Snorri Thorbrandson answered, " It may be that this is
a signal of peace, so let us take a white shield and lift it up
before them."

So they did, while the others rowed up to them, gazed
at them with astonishment, and then went on land. They
were dark men and ugly, with unkempt hair on their
heads. They had large eyes and broad cheeks. After they
had stayed a while and marvelled, they rowed off to the
south of the cape.

Karlsevni and his men had built their shelters above
the lake, some of them close to the water, others farther
away, and here they stayed that winter. There was no
snow-fall whatever, and all their cattle grazed by them-
selves in the open.

But early one morning, as spring drew near, they saw

THE SKRAELINGS TASTE MILK
FOR THE FIRST TIME

THE BULL TERRIFIES THE SKRAELINGS

The Saga of V inland ji

before their eyes a vast number of skin boats rowing
around the cape from the south. The bay was dotted with A D
them, as if it had been strewn with pieces of charcoal, 1012
and on every one the sticks were waving. Karlsevni's men
raised their shields, and when the two parties met, they
started trading with each other.

These people wanted most of all to buy red cloth. They
also wanted to buy swords and spears, but that was for-
bidden by Karlsevni and Snorri. In exchange for the cloth
they offered untanned furs and grey pelts, and for each fur
they got a span's length [about nine inches] of the cloth,
which they tied around their heads. This went on for a
while, until the Norsemen began to run short of cloth.
Then they cut it into smaller strips, until each was no
more than a finger's width, and yet the Skraelings [as the
Norsemen called the savages] gave just as much for it or
even more.

In the Greenland Saga it is told that the Norsemen sold
the savages milk. Karlsevni asked the women to carry out
vessels of milk and other dairy products. At once the sav-
ages wanted to buy this and nothing else. So the trading
turned out in this way, that the savages carried their pur-
chases away in their stomachs, while Karlsevni and his men
had possession of their furs.

Then it happened that a bull belonging to Karlsevni
and his people ran out of the woods and bellowed furi-
ously. The savages were so terrified that they ran to their
boats, and rowed along the shore to the south. For three
weeks there was no trace of them. But at the end of this
time, a vast fleet of Skraeling boats hove into sight, rush-
ing from the south like an angry torrent. This time the
savages were waving their sticks in a counter-sunwise
direction, and were yelling at the tops of their voices. This
time Karlsevni and his men took their red shields and held

j 2 Voyages to Vinland

them aloft. The savages leaped from their boats; the two
parties met and started fighting. It was a furious battle, for
the savages had warslings to help them. Karlsevni and
Snorri watched them lift up a pole with a huge knob on
the end, black in color, and about the size of a sheep's
belly, which flew up on land over the heads of the men,
and made a frightening noise when it fell. At this a great
fear seized Karlsevni and his followers, so that they thought
only of flight, and retreated up the stream. It seemed to
them that they were being attacked by savages on every
side, and this did not let up before they got back to some
cliffs, where they fought a hard battle.

Freydis came out and saw them retreating. She shouted
to them, " Why are you running away from these puny fel-
lows, fine men as you are! It looks to me as if you should
be able to cut them down like cattle* If I had weapons, I
think I could fight better than any of you! "

They paid no attention to what she was saying. She tried
to follow, but had trouble keeping up with them, for she
was with child. She went after them into the woods, and
the savages started towards her. In front of her lay a dead
man, Thorbrand, Snorri's son, whose head had been
crushed by a flat rock. Beside him lay his sword, and she
picked it up to defend herself. When the savages ap-
proached, she pulled out her breasts from under her dress
and slapped them with the naked sword. At this the sav-
ages were so appalled that they ran down to their boats
and rowed away.

Karlsevni and his men now came up to her and praised
her good fortune. Two men had fallen of his party, and a
great many of the savages, although the latter were far
superior in number. They now returned to their camp,
dressed their wounds, and talked over who the host might
be that had attacked them on land. It had seemed to them

FREYDIS DEFIES THE SKRAELINGS

The Saga of V inland 75

as if there were two attacking parties, but now they saw
that one of these must have been a delusion.

The savages found one of the dead with an axe beside
him. One of them picked up the axe and hewed at a tree
with it; one after the other tried it, and it seemed to them
a great treasure because it cut so well. Then one of them
took and struck a rock with it, so that the axe broke. They
decided then that it was useless, since it could not with-
stand stone, and tossed it away.

Karlsevni and his men were now convinced that even
though the country was richly endowed by nature, they
would always live in dread and turmoil because of the en-
mity of those who lived there before. So they made ready
to break up and return to their own country.

They sailed along the coast to the north. On the shore
they found five savages asleep, dressed in leather jackets,
and beside them vessels containing animal marrow mixed
with blood. Karlsevni judged that these men must have
been sent out as spies from this country, and killed them.

Later they found a cape that abounded in animals, and
it looked as if the cape were solidly crusted with dung from
all the animals that lay there at night. Then they reached
Streamfjord, and there they found plenty of all they
needed. Some say that Bjarni and Gudrid had stayed here
with a hundred men and gone no farther, while Karlsevni
and Snorri sailed to the south with forty men, stayed at
Hop just two months, and returned the same summer.

Karlsevni set out with one ship to search for Thorhall
the Hunter, while the others stayed in Streamfjord. They
sailed north of Keelness, and then headed west, with the
land on their port side. They found nothing but a forest
wilderness, with hardly a clearing among the trees. When
they had sailed a long time, they found a river running
from east to west into the sea. Here they steered for the

j6 Voyages to Vinland

river mouth and landed on the southern bank. [According
to the Karlsevni Saga, Thorvald Ericson was killed here
and not on that voyage of his own which has been re-
counted earlier.] After this they sailed away to the north
again.

They concluded that the mountains they found in this
country were the same as those they had seen at Hop, and
this belief was confirmed by the fact that the distance from
Streamfjord to both these places was the same. They re-
turned to Streamfjord and lived there the third winter.
A D But this winter there was much quarreling among the

101 ^ men > anc ^ women were the ca u$e of it, for those who had
no women began attacking those who did. A son named
Snorri was born to Karlsevni the first autumn, and he was
three winters old when they left.

As they sailed away from Vinland, they got a favoring
south wind, and made their way to Markland. Here they
found five savages, a bearded fellow, two women and
two children. Karlsevni and his men captured the boys,
but the rest got away arid sank into the ground. They took
the boys along, taught them to speak, and baptized them.
The boys said that their mother was named Vethilldi and
their father Uvege. They said that kings ruled the land
of the Skraelings, and one of them was named Avalldama,
the other Avilldudida. They said there were no houses
there, and that people slept under rocks or in caves. They
said there was a country on the opposite side from their
own, where people went about in white clothes, uttered
loud cries, and carried poles with banners fastened to
them. It is generally believed that this must have been
White Men's Land or Greater Ireland, So they returned
to Greenland and stayed with Eric the Red that winter.

BATTLE WITH THE SKRAELINGS

Chapter XII

FROM THE KARLSEVNI SAGA

THE SAD FATE OF BJARNI
GRIMOLFSON

Bjarni Grimolfson's ship was driven out to sea, to a place
west of Ireland where the water was full of shipworms.
Before they knew it, the ship was worm-eaten under them,
and began to sink, so they had to hold counsel on what
they should do. They had a jollyboat that was coated with
sealtar and people say that the shipworm cannot attack
wood that has been treated in this way. They started to
enter the boat, but found that only half of the crew could
get in.

Then Bjarni said, " There is room for no more than
half of our men in the boat, and therefore I propose that
we cast lots to decide who shall go. For this should not be
decided according to rank/ 1 They all felt that this was so
manful an offer that no one opposed it. When the lots
were cast, Bjarni was in that half of the crew which was to
go in the boat. But as the lucky ones were leaving the ship,
a young Icelander who had been Bj ami's shipmate said
to him, " Do you intend to desert me here, Bjarni? "

Bjarni answered, " It is so decided."

" This is not," said he, " what you promised my father,
when we left Iceland together. Then you said that we two
should share the same fate/'

8o Voyages to Vinland

" I see no other way out/' answered Bjarni, " or what
would you propose? "

" I propose/' said the other, " that we trade places, so
that you come here and I go there/'

" So be it," said Bjarni. " You come into the boat, and I
shall go up on the ship, since you are so anxious to live and
so fearful of death."

So they traded places, and Bjarni went on board the
ship. Those who were in the boat sailed away until they
reached Dublin in Ireland, and there they told this story.
But it is generally believed that Bjarni and his com-
panions perished in the wormy sea, for none of them was
ever seen again.

FREYDIS UPBRAIDS HER HUSBAND, THORVARD

Chapter XIII

FROM THE GREENLAND SAGA

FREYDIS SEEKS HER FORTUNE

Once more people fell to talking of the journey to Vin-
land, for this seemed an open road to wealth and honor.
The same summer that Karlsevni returned from Vinland, A D
a ship arrived in Greenland from Norway. The skippers 1013
were two brothers, Helgi and Finnbogi, who were of Ice-
landic stock from the East Fjords. They spent the winter
in Greenland.

Now it happened that Freydis, Eric's daughter, made a
special trip from her home in Gardar to meet the brothers
Helgi and Finnbogi. She proposed that they should sail to AD
Vinland in their vessel, and share with her all the profits 1014
they might gain together. They agreed to this. Then she
called on her brother Leif and asked if he would give her
the houses he had built in Vinland. He answered that he
would lend them to her, but would not give them away.
Freydis and the brothers agreed that each of them should
have thirty able-bodied men on board, besides women.
But Freydis broke this agreement at once by taking along
five extra men, whom she hid so the brothers knew noth-
ing of it before they got to Vinland.

Now the two ships put out to sea, having agreed to stay
together, if possible. There was no great distance between
them, but the brothers arrived shortly before Freydis, and

84 Voyages to Vinland

carried their baggage up to Leif s houses. When Freydis
landed, her crew unloaded their ship and also began carry-
ing their things up to the houses. Then Freydis exclaimed,
" Why did you put your stuff in here? "

" Because we thought/' said the brothers, " that you
would live up to all our agreements."

" Leif lent these houses to me," said she, " not to you! "

Then Helgi remarked, " We brothers are no match for
your wickedness! " They carried their belongings away
and built a house of their own. They set it up farther from
the sea, on the bank of the lake, and put it in fine order.
Meanwhile Freydis was having timber cut down to fill her
ship.

Now winter set in, and the brothers proposed that they
should while away the time by playing games and enter-
taining each other. They did so for a while, but soon the
men got to quarreling, the games were given up, and there
were no more visits between the houses. This went on far
into the winter.

Early one morning Freydis got out of bed and dressed,
but did not put on her shoes. The weather was such that a
heavy dew had fallen. She put on her husband's cloak, and
then she went to the door of the house where the two
brothers lived. Shortly before this a man had gone out and
had left the door slightly ajar. She pushed it open, stood on
the threshold a while, and said nothing. Finnbogi, who
lay farthest from the door, was awake. He said, " What do
you want here, Freydis? "

' She answered, " I want you to get up and come out with
me, so I can talk to you."

He did so, and they walked over to a log that lay near
the house wall, and sat down on it.

" How do you like it here? " said she.

" It is a fine country," he answered, " with great re-

FREYDIS MURDERS THE WOMEN OF
THE EXPEDITION

The Saga of Vinland 87

sources, but I am troubled by the squabble that has grown
up between us, for I can see no reason for it."

" There you spoke a true word/ 5 said she, " and I agree
with you. But my errand is that I should like to trade ships
with you brothers, for you have a larger ship than I, and I
am anxious to get away from here."

" I shall agree to that," said he, " if it is your pleasure."

With these words they parted. She went home and Finn-
bogi back to his bed.

She got into bed with her cold feet, and awakened Thor-
vard with them, so that he asked why she was so cold and
wet. She answered with great fury, " I went to see the
brothers and asked them to sell me their ship, because I
want a larger ship, but at that they lost their tempers, and
they struck me and treated me roughly. But you are such a
measly man that you would never avenge either my dis-
grace or your own. I am certainly finding out how far I am
from Greenland. But if you do not avenge this, I am going
to separate from you."

She kept it up until he no longer could bear her re-
proaches, and told his men to get up at once and seize their
weapons. They did so, went to the brothers' house, and
entered it while they were still asleep; they seized the men,
tied them up, and led them out one by one. Freydis had
each one killed as he came out, until all the men were
dead; but no one would kill the women. Then cried Frey-
dis, " Hand me an axe! " When she got it, she killed the
five women herself, and left them dead.

After this monstrous deed, they returned to their house,
and it was clear that Freydis thought she had managed
very cleverly. She told her crew, " If we are lucky enough
to reach Greenland again, I shall have any man killed who
speaks of these doings. Our story will be that these people
stayed on here after we left."

88 Voyages to Virdand

Early in the spring they rigged up the ship that the
A D brothers had owned and filled it with all the products they
I O I C could find, as much as the ship would carry. They had a
good sailing and got back to Ericsfjord early in the sum-
mer. There lay Karlsevni's ship all ready to sail, just wait-
ing for a fair wind. It is generally agreed that no ship has
ever sailed from Greenland more richly laden than the
one he commanded.

Freydis took up life again on her own farm, which had
not been molested while she was gone. She gave her crew
valuable gifts, for she wanted to hush up her crimes. But
not all of the men were tightlipped enough to keep from
talking about the misdeeds that had been committed.
After a time the story leaked out and got to Leif, her
brother, who was deeply distressed over it. He took three
members of Freydis' crew and tortured them until they
revealed all that had happened, and their stories tallied
exactly.

" I do not have the heart/' said Leif, " to punish my
sister Freydis as she deserves, but I foresee that her de-
scendants will enjoy little prosperity." It turned out as he
said, for from that time on, no one thought anything but ill
of them.

THROUGH TORTURE LEIF LEARNS
OF FREYDIS' GUILT

Chapter XIV

FROM THE KARLSEVNI SAGA AND
THE GREENLAND SAGA

KARLSEVNI AND GUDRID
RETURN TO ICELAND

In the meanwhile Karlsevni made his ship ready and
sailed out to sea. He had a good voyage and got to Norway
safely, and there he stayed all winter while he sold his
cargo. Both he and his wife were shown the most courteous
attention by the great men of Norway. The following A D
spring he made ready to sail for Iceland, and when he was i o 1 6
all prepared and his ship was waiting at the dock for a
favorable wind, there came to him a German from Bre-
men in Saxony. He offered to buy Karlsevni's husasnotra
[probably the ornamented ship's prow],

" It is not for sale," said he.

" I will give you half a mark in gold," said the German.
Karlsevni thought this was a fine offer and sold it to him.
The German went away with the husasnotm, but Karls-
evni was unable to say what kind of wood there was in it.
It was mosur from Vinland.

Now Karlsevni sailed away and touched land in the
north of Iceland at Skagaf jord, and there his ship was laid
up for the winter. In the spring he bought a farm at
Glaumbo and built himself a home. Here he lived the rest

92 Voyages to Viriland

of his days and was greatly esteemed; many men of high
regard have descended from him and his wife Gudrid. His
mother thought he had made a poor match when he mar-
ried Gudrid and would not live at home the first winter.
But when she discovered what an exceptional woman
Gudrid was, she returned, and the two women became
the best of friends.

When Karlsevni died, Gudrid took over the manage-
ment of the farm, together with her son Snorri, who had
been born in Vinland. When Snorri was married, she
went abroad and made a pilgrimage to Rome, and when
she returned to her son Snorri's farm, he had built a church
at Glaumbd. After that Gudrid took the veil, and lived
there as a nun the rest of her life.

Snorri had a son named Thorgeir, the father of Yngvid,
mother of Bishop Brand. A daughter of Snorri's was named
Hallfrid, and she became the mother of Bishop Thorlak.
Another son of Karlsevni and Gudrid was Bjorn, who be-
came the father of Thorunn, the mother of Bishop Bjorn.
Many men are descended from Karlsevni, for he was
blessed with a great and honorable stock. He has told more
fully than any one else the story of all these voyages, of
which something has now been repeated. Here ends this
saga.

GUDRID WITH SNORRI, THE FIRST
WHITE CHILD BORN IN AMERICA

SECTION II

THE EVIDENCE OF HISTORY

A COMMENTARY ON
THE SAGA OF VINLAND

ADAM OF BREMEN

The first story of America came to Europe in a curiously
roundabout way. It was embalmed in a great work of
church history by a German schoolmaster who clearly
never dreamt of its epochmaking possibilities. It had mi-
grated to him by word of mouth from the very outposts
of the known world, and by that time it sounded suspi-
ciously like a fable of Cockayne. But he conscientiously
put it down, for he had it from trustworthy men, and who
was he to doubt their word, however strange it might
sound?

His name was Adam, and he was head of the cathedral
school at Bremen. He appears to have visited the court of
Denmark not long after William of Normandy had crossed
the Channel to make himself master of England. Adam
eagerly gathered all the information he could about the
history and geography of Scandinavia. His master, the
archbishop of Hamburg, had designs on the newly con-
verted souls of Scandinavia, and for the first time in world
history the peoples of the North were exciting the friendly
interest of medieval chroniclers. Adam wrote faithfully
what he was told, and put it all in his History of the Arch-
bishopric of Hamburg.

Adam reported a good many surprising facts about " the

n8 Voyages to Vinland

islands of the North*' and their inhabitants. He had
learned about the marvels of the midnight sun, the cold,
dark winters, and the strange peoples of Iceland, Green-
land, and northern Norway. But strangest of all was the
story they told him of another " island/' somewhere in
this northern sea, of a very different nature from the rest.
The King of Denmark himself told Adam that " there
was an island in that ocean visited by many, which is
called Winland, for the reason that vines grow wild there,
which yield the best of wine. Moreover, unsown grain
grows there in profusion, and this we know is not a fabu-
lous fancy, for the accounts of the Danes prove that it is
a fact/'

Written sometime around 1070, this is the first authen-
tic reference in world literature to the American continent,

The king of Denmark who told Adam this story was
named Svein Estridson, and he was a nephew of Canute
the Great, erstwhile ruler of England, Denmark, and
Norway. But Svein was very unlike his uncle. He was not
a warrior, but a traveller and an observer, who found his
chief interest in a wise administration of his country.
Pope Gregory VII once addressed him as a man " well
versed in letters and zealous for the advancement of the
church/* Adam was effusive in his praise of Svein: " He
retained in his memory all the deeds of the barbarians,
exactly as if they had been written/' " All that we have
said or are going to say about the barbarians we have
learned from the accounts of this man." It is understand-
able why Adam included in his work even the statement
about the mysterious island somewhere in the Arctic with
vines and wild grain, though he clearly entertained doubts
about the truth of it.

But King Svein was right. He was one of those monarchs

The Evidence of History 99

of early Scandinavia who made a point of listening to the
tales of travelling poets and saga tellers. That such men
came to his court from Iceland and even far-away Green-
land is attested by quite a different source. There is a
touching tale in the Icelandic sagas of one Audun, who
went to Greenland and spent all he owned on a polar bear
which he brought as a gift to King Svein in Denmark. For
all we know it may have been this very man who told Svein
the story of Vinland. But there were many others, too, of
these travelling Icelanders, who made their way at the
courts of continental Scandinavia by their very special
skill of narrative and fidelity of memory. They carried
from country to country a treasure of that prose and po-
etry which was the heritage of the Scandinavians. They
were the historians of their race, and they carried to the
European continent the first intimations that there was
unknown and unsuspected land to the west*

For we know now that two generations earlier men
from Iceland had been on the American coast. They
were not men who could write, but they were quick to
tell others what they had seen. They took their stories
back to Iceland, and from there the stories spread to Nor-
way and Denmark. If we did not know this, it would be
hard to guess what Adam of Bremen meant by his brief
notice. As late as 1700, a learned Swedish scholar who did
not know the historical records of Iceland thought that
Adam's Winland was a mistake for Finland!

But when we learn that the intrepid sailor-explorers of
Iceland and Greenland applied the name " Vinland " to
a part of the American coast, and that the chief features
of this coast were its grapes and its wild wheat, then the
picture is suddenly illuminated, and we perceive the real
significance of Adam of Bremen's .statement: his brief

ioo Voyages to V inland

account is the only contemporary testimony to the Norse
discovery! But it is all we need, for Adam was a conscien-
tious historian, not given to flights of fancy.

These few sentences in medieval Latin from the elev-
enth century clinch the central fact of our story: that the
Norsemen were the first authenticated discoverers of
America,

THE LEARNED MEN OF
ICELAND

When the chiefs of Iceland voted in the year 1000 to adopt
Christianity as the law of their land, they were making
history in more ways than they could have suspected. They
were smashing the precedent established in most west
European countries that the gospel of peace on earth could
be spread only by blood and iron. More important was
the fact that they were ushering in a new era in the history
of their country. They were joining Iceland to the great
cultural unity of Europe, so that it was no longer a land
regarded as the last retreat of " barbarians " beyond the
pale of human civilization. They were also voting into
being a new class of men in Iceland the hierarchy of
the church. The first native Iceland bishop was ordained
in 1056. Before long four monastery schools had been
established. The church brought with it an art that was
new to Iceland and that was going to be of tremendous
significance to Icelandic culture: the art of writing on
parchment.

It was not that the Scandinavians had never known how
to write. They had a strange alphabet of their own, called
the " runic/' which they had learned from their Ger-

1O2 Voyages to V inland

manic kinsmen to the south. But this was little used for
the writing of texts and messages. It was inscribed chiefly
on ornamental objects and monuments, with a magic and
religious significance. The stories and poetry of the vik-
ings were not written; they were told from generation to
generation, learned and recited and learned again.

When the art of writing came to Iceland, it opened vast
new possibilities for the preservation of these traditions
without the inevitable loss that took place in oral trans-
mission. But there was one drawback; these traditions were
pagan, while the men who possessed the art were Chris-
tians. Everywhere else in northern Europe this conflict led
to the loss of the pagan traditions. The church thundered
against the black paganism of the people, and rooted it
out wherever possible. In Iceland it was different. By a
miracle of good luck, the sons of Icelandic chieftains who
took the oath of priesthood refused to extinguish the lights
of the past while taking over those of the new.

One of the first who used a Christian art to preserve
pagan lore was Ari, son of Thorgils, who was born in 1 067,
about the time that Adam of Bremen was visiting the
friendly and learned king of Denmark. He was an orphan,
fostered by a proud old chief then approaching his eighti-
eth year. This venerable man was a lover of old tales and
traditions, and his memory reached back to the end of the
pagan age. The stimulus that he gave his foster son made
Ari a collector of traditions, and the first great historian
of his native land.

When he was about fifty years old, his superiors, the
two bishops of Iceland, asked him to write a survey of the
history of that country. Ari consented, and some time
between the years 1 122 and 1 133 he produced the first his*
tory of Iceland, and one of the first histories of any Euro-
pean country not written in Latin, but in the native tongue

The Evidence of History 103

of the land. Its chief distinction, however, is that it lacks
entirely the medieval itch for the fabulous and the pictur-
esque. Ari was a sober-minded, factual fellow, who named
the sources of his information, and was much concerned
about dates and other dry facts. In the annals of his coun-
try this book won him the honorable epithet of " Ari the
Wise."

In one chapter of his work he digressed to tell the story
of how Greenland was settled. After all, Greenland was
still a diocese under Iceland, and her souls were vital to
the Iceland bishops. Ari knew the name of the first Norse
settler in Greenland, and he tells us where he got his in-
formation. An uncle of his had been in Greenland, and
there he had talked to a man who had sailed out with Eric
the Red way back in 986, a hundred and forty years before.
But this man had told Ari's uncle more than that. He told
him that when the first settlers got to Greenland, " they
found human habitations, fragments of skin boats and
stone implements from which it was evident that the same
kind of people had lived there as inhabited Vinland and
whom the Greenlanders called ' Skraelings/ "

Written around 1 1 30, this is the second authentic ref-
erence in world literature to America.

Ari knew a great deal more about Vinland than he tells
us here. He did not happen to be writing about that sub-
ject. He just alluded in passing to a place that everyone
knew; there was no-need of explaining where it lay or how
it had been discovered. After all, the Icelandic annals of
1121 state that in that year one of the bishops of Green-
land sailed out to look for Vinland.

Ari did not remain the only historian of Iceland. In the
century that followed, historical writing blossomed lux-
uriantly in that little country. Pagan traditions crossed
with clerical learning to produce one of the world's great

104 Voyages to V r inland

cultures. Around 1200 a grand compilation was made of
oral traditions current about Icelandic families and en-
titled " The Book of Settlement/' In this attempt to give
the name of every important Icelandic settler and his gene-
alogy, Vinland is twice mentioned, quite as a matter of
course. In other written traditions of this period the story
of Vinland is repeatedly alluded to. And in 1 347 the Ice-
landic annals tell about a ship that had drifted in to the
Iceland coast. It had started from Greenland, sailed to
Markland (the Norse name for another part of the Ameri-
can coast) , and had then been driven off its course. This
is the last historical allusion to America in old Icelandic
literature.

Together, these allusions clearly show that from the
twelfth to the fourteenth century the learned men of Ice-
land knew that there were lands to the west of Europe
which had been visited by their countrymen. They had
names for these lands, and stories were current about their
inhabitants and their natural characteristics. But the allu-
sions of the learned historians were mere footnotes to their
fascinating tale of Icelandic life. They would tell us little
about America if we did not also have the narratives of the
sagas to fill in the missing details. These narratives make
up the body of this volume, and to give them a proper
setting, we shall make an excursion into viking life and
viking traditions.

VIKING TRADITIONS

From the ninth century to the eleventh the North Atlantic
was a Scandinavian sea. Men from the Norwegian fjords
plied busily back and forth from Norway to the British
Isles, the Shetlands, the Faroes, the Hebrides, Iceland,
Greenland, and the American continent.

They were called " vikings " because they originally
made their homes in the sheltering bays (called " vik ")
of the North. Their small, swift-sailing vessels took the
pacified peoples of western Europe by surprise, for the vi-
kings did not hesitate to use force. They greedily took
what they wanted jewels, women, cattle, weapons,
money all the beckoning glitter of a culture more re-
fined than their own. Their unconsecrated hands did not
even spare the bulging wealth of the Church, already
grown fat through the protective indulgence of royal
power. " Deliver us, O Lord," cried the terrified monks,
" from the fury of the Northmen! "

This grim, but picturesque view of the viking is deeply
enshrined in our American imagination, and is accurate
as far as it goes. But piracy and marauding were only one
aspect of viking life the professional careers of a very
small number of chieftains. As coastal guards were
strengthened, and royal authority rose within the North,

106 Voyages to Vinland

viking piracy became an even rarer method of gaining
wealth. The transfer of goods from hand to hand took a
more peaceable course, as barter and commerce. New ave-
nues to wealth and fame were opened to those who could
take advantage of them. An illuminating story is told
about one Bjorn, son of Brynjolf, who lived in Sogn, a
famous Norwegian fjord. He wanted to get away from
home to forget an unhappy love affair, and asked his father
to fit him out with a warship and a crew so he could go
a-viking. But his father refused. Instead he gave him a
trading ship with a cargo of goods to Dublin, and said,
" That is now the most honorable voyage/' Ancestral own-
ership of land was no longer the sole title to power, and
merchant careers like those of Einar of Thorgeir's Fell
and Thorfinn Karlsevni in our saga were made possible.
Unoccupied lands in the west also beckoned to those
who were uncomfortable amid the growing centralization
of authority. The viking movement became a great expan-
sion of peoples, which brought Scandinavian populations
to Normandy in France, northern England, Scotland, Ire-
land, and the islands to the North. The Shetlands were the
first stepping stone, occupied in the eighth century; after
that came the Faroes and Orkneys, England and Ireland
(by 800) , Iceland (about 870) , Greenland (in 985 or
986) , and America (around 1000) .

While the viking vessels thus brought Scandinavians
to the rest of Europe, they also brought Europe to Scan-
dinavia. They became the bond that tied Scandinavia to
western Europe. For these frail bottoms carried back to
the North new products of a southern culture, new ideas
and beliefs, new demands on life. For better or for worse,
the isolation of Scandinavia was at an end. In the year 1000
the chiefs of Iceland voted to adopt Christianity. Thirty
years later Olaf, the patron saint of Norway, was mar-

The Evidence of History 107

tyred in the struggle to convert his countrymen. The re-
sistance of Germanic paganism was at length broken in its
last strongholds, and the Church could enroll new con-
verts in the majestic folds of its supernational organization.
A period of restless and exciting activity came to an end.
The viking expansion had reached a natural border; trade
and travel had turned the vikings into Christian men,
however thin the veneer that covered their turbulent tem-
peraments.

But fortunately they did not completely forget their
past. In Iceland, a remote corner of the Scandinavian area,
they even clung to it with such tenacity that it survived
the coming of a new faith and the passage of generations.
Iceland was settled by emigrants from Norway, many of
whom had first spent some time in the Norse settlements
of the British Isles. These settlers were no poor, land-
hungry emigrants; they were closely knit groups of friends
and families, headed by proud chieftains who were unwill-
ing to bow to changing circumstances in the homeland. In
Iceland they set up the same aristocratic oligarchy that
they knew from Norway, and a legal system in close imi-
tation of the Norwegian. Only one feature did they ex-
pressly reject; the kingship, whose authority might menace
their own. Instead they established one of the world's first
parliaments an annual meeting of all free citizens, di-
rected by the chiefs and empowered to make laws and pass
judgments, but not to execute them.

Iceland thus became a miniature Scandinavia, chang-
ing but little in the course of centuries. The fierce pride of
the ruling families, the comparative isolation of Iceland
from the strife of the Continent, and the stability of the
social order led to an extraordinary interest in tradition.
On long winter evenings the Icelandic household listened
with fascination to tales of the great exploits of ancient

io8 Voyages to Vinland

days, especially those exciting centuries before society set-
tled down into the dull pattern of clerical ritualism. When
these events had originally occurred, none of the rough
and ready men who acted in them had been scholars. But
certain ones among them developed a special skill of mem-
ory and narration, which established them in the com-
munity as entertainers and as oracles of ancient wisdom.
As one generation of saga tellers died, new ones took up
the tradition and passed it on.

Such narration in far-away Iceland has been the means
of rescuing most of what we know today about the pagan
religion of our Germanic ancestors in England, Germany,
and Scandinavia, about Scandinavian history between 800
and 1200, and all that may truly be called Scandinavian
literature before 1300.

Most of this great body of verse and prose was written
down between 1 100 and 1300 by men with clerical train-
ing. It had then been current in oral narration anywhere
from one to three hundred years. Its contents range from
fantastic adventure to the soberest reality, all comprised
under the term " saga " which means only " that which
is said " and was applied to all prose narrative.

But the Icelanders had a sharp sense of the difference
between sagas: they knew whether they were dealing with
truth or fiction. They had some sagas they called " lying
sagas " or " stepmother sagas/' and one Norwegian king
admitted that he found these the most entertaining. But
those sagas that really touched their own or their ances-
tors' lives were of a different nature. They were told in the
full conviction that they had really happened, and were
the more real the closer their scene of action lay to Iceland,
the center of the Icelander's universe. The most vivid and
credible were the Icelandic Family Sagas, which pictured
the clan feuds of Iceland between 870 and 1000. Next

The Evidence of History ion

to these came the sagas of the Norwegian kings between
870 and 1500, with inserted adventures of Icelanders
throughout the Norwegian colonies of the North Atlantic.
As soon as the narrative moved out of this period or this
area, its events grew fabulous and improbable.

Students have asked again and again: how could the
Icelanders possibly have preserved through three centu-
ries any accurate information about the deeds of their
ancestors without the help of writing? There have been
voices like those of the skeptical Lord Raglan, who airily
declared of the sagas that " their principal incidents are
mythological." Some devout admirers of the saga have
gone to the opposite extreme of holding each word to be
that of inspiration. They have taken it for granted that the
stories as we have them were composed shortly after
the events, and that by some prodigious feat of memory
the Icelanders learned them by heart generation after
generation until a man of letters came to fasten them to
parchment.

Amid the clamor of believers and skeptics the scholars
have spent many conscientious hours trying to unravel
fact from fiction in the sagas. They have combed archives
for contemporary sources and they have excavated mate-
rial objects of the viking age. They have checked the sagas
with each other, working out their chronology, and see-
ing how it dovetails with dates from other sources. A com-
parison has been made with similar traditions in modern
Norway, where documents are available to check the nar-
rative.

Out of this labor has come confirmation that historical
facts can be preserved in folk tradition over a surpris-
ingly long period. But people must have some reason
for so preserving them, and special conditions of social
life must be present to keep the tradition from swerving

Voyages to Vinland

too far from fact. Such conditions did exist among the Ice-
landers, by virtue of their family pride, their isolation
from the rest of the world, and the smallness of their com-
munities. Family pride was no academic matter; one's
family tree was a patent of nobility, a source of strength
in the community. Isolation prevented the mass of new,
fresh material from overwhelming the old to the same
extent as it does in modern life. The narrowness of the
group led to close contact between people; the truth could
not be concealed, for every one knew about every one else;
private secrets were not easy to keep.

The sagas as we know them are certainly a species of
literature, and they owe their artistic qualities largely to
the age that wrote them down. The pattern as a whole is
that of Christian Iceland of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. But the bits out of which these mosaics were
woven are traditional facts from the pagan communities of
an earlier day. The roots of the sagas go back to the sort
of tales that pass in every community about the doings of
its citizens. A dash of gossipy narrative, a bit of journal-
istic exaggeration, the earthy humor of a local commenta-
tor, perhaps some family backbiting these were the ele-
ments out of which a chain of skillful story-tellers welded
their sagas. Where information failed, imagination might
come to the rescue and supply repartee, secret decisions,
hidden motives, childhood escapades, and dramatic de-
nouements. The value of such talk for historical purposes
depends entirely on the information and the accuracy of
the original story-tellers. The historical sagas are therefore
not strictly factual and analytic history in the modern
sense. They are tales of historic events, undeniably colored
by the interests of generations of story-tellers and listen-
ers, and the more accurate the closer they are to the origi-
nal events in time and place.

The Evidence of History 1 1 1

The story of Vinland was not one of the central tales of
Icelandic tradition. It was not among the earliest to be
written down, and its events took place in a distant land,
far out on the rim of the Norse world. It was not easy for
its facts to remain unconfused. But it did involve the an-
cestors of a distinguished Icelandic family, who had an
interest in keeping it alive. More than this, it contained
the history of how Iceland's only colony, Greenland, was
settled, a tale of great interest as long as relations were
continually maintained.

It is by the interplay of all these factors of human effort
and human error that the sagas have become what they are
today: intensely vivid tales, full of the life of bygone days,
true in substance, but subject to human vagary. Of such
stuff is woven the story of ancient Vinland.

THE TWO VERSIONS '

Paper was practically unknown in Iceland before 1600,
but there were plenty of sheep, whose skins could be
turned into parchment. In spite of smoke and damp, van-
dalism and the tooth of time, the Icelanders have managed
to rescue some seven hundred vellum manuscripts from
their medieval past. Most of these have now found their
way to Copenhagen. They date all the way from 1 1 50 to
1550, but relatively few of them are originals written in
the early part of this period. After 1300 the copying of
older manuscripts became a regular industry.

In those days of expensive bookmaking, books were
treasures, and some of the wealthy men of Iceland were
anxious to build up impressive libraries. They hired
scribes to copy whatever manuscripts they could lay their
hands on and to compile elegant new volumes. It often
mattered less what the books contained than that they
were beautifully written and attractively illuminated. The
results were among the finest specimens of Icelandic book-
making, treasured in Icelandic families for generations.
The farmer who owned the Flatey Book in the seven-
teenth century would not part with it for five hundreds
of land.

Three of these compilations happen to include the sur-

The Evidence of History 113

viving accounts of Norse voyages to Vinland. The oldest
was written around 1330 for a noted Icelandic and Nor-
wegian dignitary named Hauk Erlendson, a descendant
of Thorfinn Karlsevni; after him it bears the name
" Hauk's Book/ 7 The next was written between 1387 and
1394 for Jon Hakonarson, an Icelandic squire, and is the
largest and best preserved of all Icelandic manuscripts.
In the seventeenth century, when it was rediscovered, it
was owned by a family living at Flatey (Flat Island) in
Broadfjord; for this reason it is known as the "Flatey
Book." The third and youngest dates from the first half of
the fifteenth century, and bears no other name than its
catalogue number in the Arnamagnean Library in Copen-
hagen, AM. 557, 4to.

All of these are copied from earlier manuscripts, proba-
bly going back to the thirteenth century. The first
contains a saga which is entitled " Thorfinn Karlsevni's
Saga " (though only in a late hand) . The second contains
two sections inserted into a saga of King Olaf Trygvason,
one of which is entitled " Tale of the Greenlanders." The
third contains a saga entitled " Saga of Eric the Red." Of
these the first and third are practically the same; the dif-
ferences are only such as might have been caused by
scribes and copyists. We shall unite these under the title
of the " Karlsevni Saga," because they deal chiefly with
the exploits of Thorfinn Karlsevni. The second saga,
which appears in the Flatey Book, we shall call the
" Greenland Saga/' These two versions stand in the sharp-
est contrast.

The Greenland Saga tells us that the first man to sight
American shores was one Bjarni Herjulfson, while the
Karlsevni Saga says that it was Leif Ericson. According to
the Greenland Saga, Leif s discovery was a planned ex-
pedition, but according to Karlsevni's Saga it was an acci-

1 14 Voyages to V inland

dent. The former gives a detailed account o Leif 's voyage,
while the latter concentrates on Karlsevni. The former
also tells about separate voyages made by Leif s brother,
Thorvald, and his half-sister Freydis. The latter insists
that the others accompanied Karlsevni on his voyage.

These and other discrepancies show that two separate
traditions were current in Iceland about the Vinland
voyages. The one found in the Karlsevni Saga was the
generally accepted one in Iceland, as we see from certain
references in other sagas. The sagas of the Norwegian
kings, including Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla^ take
it as a fact that Leif Ericson was blown out of his course
on the way home from Norway in the year 1000 and found
Vinland on this trip. This appears to be the official ver-
sion, probably kept alive by the distinguished descendants
of Thorfinn Karlsevni and Gudrid. Quite isolated from
this tradition and without any apparent influence in
either direction stands the account of the Greenland Saga.
This story is less interested in Karlsevni and concentrates
on the family of Eric the Red in Greenland. It has been
suggested that perhaps this saga lived at first in Greenland
and was later brought to Iceland.

During the past half century a bitter debate has been
waged concerning the relative merits of these two ver-
sions. Until 1887 there was a general preference for the
Greenland Saga, but in that year the Norwegian historian
Gustav Storm vigorously attacked this version and in-
sisted on the superior accuracy and consistency of the
Karlsevni Saga. Specialists in Icelandic literature have in
general supported this view (Jonsson, ThorSarson, Her-
mannsson) . Other students of the subject, however, whose
approach has been less purely literary (Hovgaard,
Gathorne-Hardy, Br0gger) have been unwilling to dis-
miss the Greenland Saga in so cavalier a fashion. Their

The Evidence of History 1 1 c;

attitude has been that of Professor Hovgaard: " The
truth probably lies between the two sagas/'

This much is certain: in their eagerness to assert the
superiority of the Karlsevni Saga, its advocates have over-
shot their mark. It is true that the Karlsevni Saga stands
close to the historical family sagas of Iceland, while the
Greenland Saga in certain respects Is reminiscent of the
so-called " Lying " or " Fabulous " Sagas. But to main-
tain, as some do, that the Greenland Saga is only a con-
fused reminiscence of the other, or to heap lofty sarcasm
on its weaknesses is a fall into the opposite extremity. One
eminent authority can even bring himself to write that
Tyrker is "of course, a caricature of Thorhall Hunts-
man/' though the similarities are insignificant. Some of
the weaknesses these writers bring up against the Green-
land Saga are imaginary, as their assertion that Tyrker
was drunk when he brought the grapes back, or that Leif
loaded his ship with grapes in the spring. Both of these are
inferences which the text does not support. These writers
also have a tendency to minimize the weaknesses of the
Karlsevni Saga, its story of unipeds (not included in the
present version) , its illusory Indian attackers, its strange
Scotch runners with the names Haki and Hekja, its moun-
tains in Vinland, Leif s gallant adventure in the Heb-
rides, the two Skraeling boys and their mythical Greater
Ireland.

Even the most confirmed opponents of the Greenland
Saga admit that there are certain " reminiscences of genu-
ine tradition " in it. There are statements and episodes
in it which can only go back to stories by those who acted
in them. If so, it is extremely unlikely that those who told
this saga needed to draw on the Karlsevni Saga at all, or
had ever heard of it. They were out of touch with Ice-
landic saga tradition, and lacked the means of checking

n6 Voyages to V inland

up on certain facts of chronology. But they were better
informed on what happened in the family of Eric the Red
than was the official Icelandic tradition.

When the two versions agree, it is therefore a double
confirmation of historical accuracy. When they disagree,
it is partly due to a difference in stress and point of view.
The K arise vni Saga is the story of an Icelandic family,
polished off with all the refinement of its literary type.
The Greenland Saga is a tale of exploration and adven-
ture, more episodic, and inclined to stress the miracles and
surprises of the amazing new country beyond the seas.

THE LAND OF ERIC THE RED

A papal letter written in 1492 declares that " Greenland
lies at the end of the world/' Few Americans realize that
since its first exploration by Eric the Red in 982, Green-
land was well-known as the extreme outpost of European
civilization. It appears regularly on medieval maps, and
throughout the Middle Ages commercial and ecclesiasti-
cal contact with the European continent was maintained.
For nearly five hundred years a very considerable Norse
colony supported life on a strip of western coast between
a stormy sea and the vast inland ice of Greenland.

American discovery begins with the story of this colony,
for Greenland was the last stepping stone in the Norse
trek across the North Atlantic. The explorers and colo-
nizers who reached out to the American continent were
sons and friends of the man who settled Greenland.

But Greenland is itself a part of the New World, and
the story of its discovery and settlement a part of Ameri-
can history. It also deserves a place in our narrative for its
own intrinsic fascination. On the western coast of Green-
land are still visible the ruins of the first structures built by
white men in the western hemisphere. These have been
excavated by the hundreds, and shown to be the sites of
Norse churches, farm houses, and barns* Their skeletons,

n8 Voyages to V inland

implements, jewels, inscriptions, and even clothing are
vivid confirmations of the story told in Iceland's an-
cient sagas. Modern Danish archeologists have made the
frozen soil of Greenland yield up a record of viking life
more vivid and 'complete than that found in any other
part of the Scandinavian world.

It all began with one of those lucky accidents that
marked exploration in an age when sailors were wholly
at the mercy of the wind and the stars. Sometime after
900 a certain Gunnbjorn was on his way to Iceland, but
blew out of his course and sighted land to the west of
Iceland. A generation earlier Iceland itself had been dis-
covered in exactly the same way. Gunnbjorn must have
seen something of the rocky, ice-bound eastern coast of
Greenland, and found it too uninviting for further ex-
ploration. His discovery was known, however, and talked
about in Iceland; but there was too much available land
in Iceland for any one to bother.

Many years passed, and Gunnbjorn's Reefs were still
unexplored. Icelandic society began settling into a rela-
tively stable pattern, and the age of pioneering was over.
About 960 a chief in southwestern Norway named Thor-
vald got into trouble with his neighbors, and found it ad-
visable to emigrate to Iceland. He and his son Eric found
nothing to settle on but a bleak shore in the extreme
northwest of Iceland. Eric, nicknamed " the Red," proba-
bly from the color of his hair, had no taste for this kind
of inferiority. He married a girl from a more southerly
district, cleared a farm in the prosperous valley of Hawk-
dale, and started to work his way up. But he had terrific
odds against him, surrounded by well-established and hos-
tile chiefs, who relished no upstarts. They succeeded in
getting him banished from Hawkdale, and he had to flee
to some unprofitable islands in the mouth of the fjord,

The Evidence of History 119

where he took up an uncertain and temporary residence.

These events are all related in the first chapter of our
saga, which is devoted to the figure of Eric and the great
decision which grew out of his troubles in Iceland. Eric
was outlawed a second time, now from all Iceland; not
because his crimes were so outrageous, but because his
friends were less powerful than his enemies. In a system
of family alliances and enmities, with constant maneuver-
ing for power, Eric got the worst of it. But this defeat
brought out the real character of the man: he did not turn
to viking piracy, and he did not try to court the favor of
kings and chiefs in the older settlements. Instead he de-
cided to spend the three years of his banishment explor-
ing new lands and opening up new possibilities.

After a touching goodbye to his friends and supporters,
he set off on one of the most amazing voyages of explora-
tion on record. He hove into sight of the impassable east
coast of Greenland and followed it southwards, until he
rounded the southern tip and at length found inhabitable
land. Here he systematically explored the coast and its
fjords through three summers and winters. The shore he
found was not radically different from that of western
Norway and Iceland; he saw that in spite of its vast dis-
tance from home, and its bleak, treeless aspect, it was well
adapted to human life. His enthusiasm was so infectious
that he was able to spread it to others when he got back
to Iceland. His propaganda tactics (which included even
the detail of an attractive name: Greenland) were so suc-
cessful that several hundred settlers accompanied him on
his voyage of settlement. That nearly half of them were
shipwrecked is only additional evidence of what difficul-
ties and dangers Eric had had to overcome in successfully
opening up this new land to Norse settlement.

In Greenland Eric's qualities found then* fulfillment.

12O Voyages to V inland

He became the honored patriarch of a settlement that
eventually grew to include some three thousand inhabit-
ants. They were grouped in two sections, the Eastern Set-
tlement where Eric lived, and farther to the north the
smaller Western Settlement. Eric lived to see his sons
grow up into hardy explorers, who followed his example
by pushing on to new lands still farther afield. One of
them was even received at the Norwegian court, and given
a royal commission to make Christians out of the heathen
Greenlanders. But this intrusion upon his patriarchal au-
thority Eric resented. He grumpily told his son Leif that
the good deed he had committed by rescuing a ship-
wrecked crew was offset when he brought " this faker "
the priest to Greenland. For all he could do, the new
doctrines intruded themselves squarely into his own
home. His wife built the first church in Greenland right
on their farm, and applied direct personal pressure on
Eric to abandon his paganism. The saga describes the
agony of Eric's dilemma, in terms that are restrained but
very pointed.

From this beginning the Church grew to be a real power
in Greenland. Sixteen parish churches were built, all of
stone; in 1112 the first bishop of Greenland left Iceland
to visit his new see. At Gardar in the Eastern Settlement
a cathedral was built, ninety feet long and fifty feet wide,
with glass windows and a timbered gable. In one of its
chapels there was found in 1926 the skeleton of a bishop,
with a plain gold episcopal ring on his ring finger, and
in his right hand a bishop's crozier, a stick of ash with an
iron ferrule at one end and a beautifully carved head of
walrus ivory at the other. Bishops were reluctant to make
the long and arduous voyage to Greenland, certainly an
unprofitable see. Yet throughout the centuries of its ex-
istence the Greenland colony maintained its Christian

The Evidence of History 121

customs of worship and burial. " The dead lie piously
with folded arms, and not infrequently with a small
wooden cross in the hands or on the breast." Runic in-
scriptions on these crosses often tell the names of the dead,
and commend them to God. But they also reveal that the
practice of pagan magic described in our saga did not die
out with the coming of Christianity.

Today Eskimos roam the fields that once were popu-
lated by Norsemen. But there were no Eskimos in this
part of Greenland when the Norsemen came, nor for
several centuries afterwards. However simple and primi-
tive the life of the Norse settlers must have been, it was
not like that of the Eskimos. The Eskimos were nomads,
who lived on fish and game; they roamed over a wide area
to find their food. The Norsemen could use these prod-
ucts only to supplement their diet; they were a settled,
agricultural people, basically dependent on dairy prod-
uce. When Eric explored Greenland, he had to be on the
lookout for those green spots in the inner fjords that meant
pasturage and fodder for cattle. In these inlets between
the sea and the glacier the Norsemen raised cows, sheep,
goats, and pigs in great numbers. The excavations o
Eric's farm alone show four barns, with room for forty
cows. No wonder that in the thirteenth century a Nor-
wegian scribe could write, " It is said that in Greenland
there are good pastures and there are large and good
farms, for there they have many cattle and sheep, and
there they make much butter and much cheese; they live
on these mainly, and also on meat and game of many
kinds, reindeer meat, whale meat, seal meat, and bear
meat."

At its best, life in Greenland was very much like that
of the other Norse colonies of the North Atlantic. Our
saga describes the jolly winter spent at Brattahlid by

122 Voyages to Vinland

Thorfinn Karlsevni and his men. Excavations have
brought to light neatly carved chessmen of whale bone
and walrus ivory with which they must have whiled away
many idle hours. Clothing found in the graves bears testi-
mony that men and women tried to follow the styles of
their contemporaries in Europe. One of the poems of the
Elder Edda claims to have been composed in Greenland,
and it may be true, for the poem incongruously intro-
duces a polar bear into the epic tale of the Nibelungs.
Even on this remote shore the poetic vein of the viking
bards could find expression, as is confirmed by the verse
of our saga.

The difference between this and the other Norse colo-
nies was that life in Greenland was more precariously
poised. Grain could not grow there; iron was extremely
scarce; wood for fuel and building had to be imported or
found as driftwood. The Icelandic annals report that in
1189 there came to Iceland a Greenland ship which was
held together almost wholly by wooden nails and whale
bone. For a long time the chief product of Greenland that
could be bartered for the products of European civiliza-
tion was walrus ivory* This was supplemented with seal
hides and live polar bears. But toward the end of the Mid-
dle Ages the Greenland products lost out in the compe-
tition of other wares; walrus ivory gave way to elephant
tusks from Africa. The colony was no longer so tempting
to commercial enterprise.

In the meanwhile political conditions in the homeland
were rapidly changing. In 1397 Norway entered into a
union with Sweden and Denmark which drew her atten-
tion away from the North Atlantic colonies* Since 1561
the Greenlanders had been subject to the Norwegian
king, and he had promised to send them two ships a year;
it was forbidden for others to trade with them. But in

The Evidence of History 123

1349 Scandinavia was ravaged by the Black Death; a gen-
eral impotence fell over these countries, and from 1367
there is no record that any royal ship ever left for Green-
land. In 1408 a party of Icelanders was blown off its course
and landed in Greenland. They are the last Icelanders
known to have visited the Greenland colony. At this time
the Western Settlement was already blotted out, and a
new menace threatened the Norsemen, the Eskimos.
From the middle of the thirteenth century they had been
pressing southward. Although their methods and equip-
ment for fighting were inferior to those of the Norsemen,
they had the advantage of greater numbers.

But by the fifteenth century the Norsemen themselves
were not the hardy specimens of manly perfection that
had harried Europe five centuries before. The skeletons
from Greenland graveyards that have been excavated and
minutely analyzed by Danish scientists tell an amazing
tale of malnutrition and degeneration. All indications
point to a lowering of vitality due to a worsening of
climate. A few bad years would be enough to wipe out the
margin that made life possible. Their height was down
to five feet; their life span to thirty; their skeletons were
malformed, atrophied, constricted, until their women
could no longer bear children; their teeth were worn down
and their brain capacities reduced. In the words of Pro-
fessor N0rlund, *' They had become an inactive flock of
debilitated individuals, undersized and deformed/'

Yet the Eastern Settlement must have lingered on
toward the end of the fifteenth century, when the atten-
tion of Europe was again directed to the west. Some of
them may have been alive when Columbus set out for the
Indies. In 1519 Christiern II, King of Denmark and Nor-
way, made plans for " sending a huge fleet to win back
Greenland from the heathen/' But contact with Greenland

124 Voyages to V r inland

was not again established until the Englishman John Davis
went ashore years later, in 1585. In 1721 a Norwegian
missionary, Hans Egede, went to Greenland in the hope
of finding his old countrymen and winning them back to
the true faith; but he stayed to become the apostle of the
Eskimos.

The chain that had tied the Norse settlements of the
North Atlantic together had been too weak. Greenland
was broken off, and it is no wonder that the very last link,
America, was entirely lost in the gathering dust of time.

VOYAGES TO VINLAND

The Norsemen found America in just the same way that
they had found Iceland and Greenland, and before that
the Shetlands and the Faroes: by a combination of luck and
skill. Wind and storm drove the viking boats out of their
familiar channels into sight of new shores. Reports of the
survivors were eagerly heard by enterprising men who
saw a chance of wealth and adventure in the search for new
lands. After the discoverers and explorers came the set-
tlers, who set out with friends and family, goods and live-
stock to make their homes in greener pastures. This had
been the pattern of each preceding step in viking expan-
sion, but only for Vinland do we have a detailed picture
of the whole process, lighted by human episodes. That
Naddod who first sighted Iceland and that Gunnbjorn
who first saw Greenland are only names; but Bjarni Her-
julfson is vividly real to us, because he lived within the age
rescued to our gaze by the Icelandic Saga.

Bjarni was a merchant viking, who carried goods in his
own ship between Norway and Iceland sealskins, wool,
down, and fish from Iceland in exchange for wine, grain,
iron, and timber from Norway. He was a skillful mariner,
willing to try a course he had never sailed for the sake of
being with his father. But the weather blew him far to

126 Voyages to V inland

the south of Greenland, his destination. He may have
drifted as far as the New England coast, which he knew
was not Greenland because it bore the wrong aspect and
faced the wrong way. The coast sloped to the north and
east, so he set sail in the only direction he could take to
reach a likelier shore. He did not need to hug the coast,
for a skilled seaman can sense its presence even when it is
out of sight. He probably skirted Nova Scotia and New-
foundland, and then struck boldly across Davis Strait to
his destination.

Nothing was done about his discovery in Greenland
until Leif, a son of the patriarchal Eric, grew old enough
to start sailing. He showed a boldness worthy of his stock
by sailing straight across to Norway without the usual stop
in Iceland. It was the first non-stop sail of the Atlantic,
slightly marred by a forced landing in the Hebrides, and
a subsequent gallant adventure. His purpose in Norway
was that of so many Icelandic chiefs' sons: to be presented
at court and gain the wealth and prestige resulting from
the king's favor. But this king was different from the
earlier ones. This Olaf had taken up a new religion and
made this faith a condition of his favor. Olaf Trygvason
did not hesitate to imprison and put to death those who
defied his missionary zeal. Shortly before this he had
rounded up all the leading Icelanders in Trondheim and
held them as hostages for the conversion of Iceland. Leif
had his qualms about trying to spread the new gospel of
peace on earth in Greenland, for he knew his father. But
the king managed to persuade him, and so Leif took over
the role of missionary.

Now it is uncertain whether Leif found America acci-
dentally on his way home, as the Karlsevni Saga says, or
whether he made a special voyage of exploration later,
as the Greenland Saga says. Here the two versions part

The Evidence of History 127

company. In the former case the discovery was made in
1000 A.D., 'as most other Icelandic sources insist; in the
latter case it was not before 1002.

Leif was a man of the kind that the Norsemen admired;
the epithet " lucky/' which he got by rescuing a ship-
wrecked crew, was a word of greater depth and signifi-
cance in those days. The king alluded to Leif s luck, and
Leif later declared that his father Eric had this quality;
their luck was not an accident, but was felt to be the re-
sult of very real gifts and abilities. It is in connection with
Leifs voyage that we first hear the familiar Norse names
applied to the various parts of the American coast: Hellu-
land, which may have been Newfoundland or Labrador;
Markland, which may have been Nova Scotia; and Vin-
land, which was probably somewhere in New England.
We shall see later why these identifications are so vague
and uncertain.

These new discoveries made a great stir in Greenland.
The settlements buzzed with excited talk about explora-
tion. A dream of happier circumstances rose before viking
eyes the dream of a country flowing with wine and
wheat, amazing for its gentle winters, full of wood for
their houses and feed for their cattle. But it soon appeared
that the dreani was not going to be too easy to realize.
Thorvald, a brother of Leifs, was the first to pay for it
with his life. He led an expedition in 1 004, if we can rely on
the Greenland Saga, but in the second year of his absence
he met the natives, and fell a victim to their arrows. His
men returned in 1007, and the following year a third
brother, Thorstein, made the same attempt. But he, too,
seems to have lacked his brother Leifs and his father
Eric's luck, for he was driven about by storms all summer
and never caught sight of Vinland.

Then a new figure comes into prominence in our

128 Voyages to V inland

saga, an Icelandic merchant named Thorfinn the Prom-
ising (Karlsevni) . According to the reckoning of the
Greenland Saga he got to Greenland in 1009; the Karls-
evni Saga is less definite, requiring only that he get there
after 1002. Karlsevni belonged to a wealthier and more
powerful society than did the Greenlanders; in a pinch
he could even do a good turn to their chief, Eric the Red.
He had what the Greenlanders lacked, the capital with
which to equip a true expedition of settlement. His pur-
pose in coming to Greenland was simply to make a good
deal; but the exciting news he got there turned his mind
to a new and greater enterprise.

There is something impressive about this expedition,
with its three ships and its hundred and sixty men. It was
more than a raid, or a jaunt of adventure; there were
women and cattle aboard, regular equipment for a per-
manent settlement. The Greenland Saga specifically says
that " they planned to settle in this county, if it were possi-
ble." There were both Icelanders and Greenlanders
along, and among the crew and its leaders such miscel-
laneous personalities as the noble Bjarni Grimolfson and
the glowering, but indispensable pagan ThorhalL

Karlsevni followed a different route from that of his
predecessors; he chose to start from Greenland's West-
ern Settlement, and must therefore have hit the American
coast farther to the west and north, probably somewhere
in Labrador. He coasted along its shore to the southeast,
and his Markland may well have been somewhere in
Labrador or Newfoundland. From here on the saga gives
such intricate and confusing sailing directions that it is
quite likely he sailed through the Strait of Belle Isle into
the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Here he spent his first, unfortu-
nate winter in America. The men were so busy exploring
that they gathered no supplies for the winter, probably ex-

The Evidence of History 129

pecting that the winter would be mild. But it turned out to
be very severe, and the saga pictures their unhappy predic-
ament. There were no grapes, and this was clearly not the
Vinland they had heard about. Thorhall's sarcastic verses
express the dissatisfaction of many in the party. But in
the spring Karlsevni made his way out of this area, proba-
bly around Nova Scotia and down the coast of New Eng-
land and Leif 's Vinland.

Here he met his first savages. Discouraged by the dis-
astrous encounter, he retreated to the original camp in
the more secure Streamf jord. He sought the lost Thorhall
in the inner parts of the Gulf, but in vain. On his way
home he picked up a couple of savages, mere lads, who
may have been either Eskimos or Indians. In any case it
is a mistake to make anything out of their supposed bab-
blings. Then he sailed across Davis Strait again to his des-
tination in the Eastern Settlement of Greenland, reach-
ing it in i o 1 3 as the Greenland Saga reckons.

While the voyage itself bears all the marks of authentic
history, there is an air of imaginative embroidery about
some of its details. The story of how Freydis terrified the
Indians is an amusing piece of Icelandic slapstick, selected
by one of the saga narrators for its effective character por-
trayal. But it has been shown by Stefan Einarsson that this
episode may reflect more ancient beliefs, the magic fear
inspired in primitive peoples by the violation of a taboo.
Similar behavior is recorded in Irish literature, among the
ancients by Plutarch, and is reported in our own day from
the Lapps of northern Europe, Cii Chulainn, the Irish
hero, was one of those whose strength was sapped at the
sight of feminine nakedness.

There still remains a voyage of quite a different charac-
ter from the others, so base and senselessly cruel that many
regard it as a mere invention. In the Flatey Book version

130 Voyages to Vinland

Freydis is said to have sailed to Vinland in 1014 and re-
turned in 1015 after the foulest and most unmotivated
murder spree in all Icelandic literature. Her earlier ex-
ploits against the Indians were amazing, even amusing;
this tale is sheer horror. It violates both decency and prob-
ability, and Leif s acquiescence is utterly un-Icelandic.
In her amazonic strength of character, however, she does
not stand alone among Norse women of ancient days.
Their position was a privileged one, and their influence
on history could more than once be baneful enough. Such
was Hallgerd in the Saga of Burnt Njal, who refused to
give her husband a lock of her hair to mend his bowstring,
even though his life depended on it, because she re-
membered an insult he had offered her years before.

Whatever we think of Freydis and her harshness, we
must see in the portrait of her character one of the many
striking depictions offered us by the saga. We cannot now
say how much is history and how much is art in these de-
scriptions, but all of them help to build up an unforget-
table picture of ancient Norse life. We see Eric, undaunted
by men but subdued by his wife's passive resistance, the
patriarch of his colony but troubled to think that a chance
visitor would go back to Iceland and complain of the enter-
tainment. We are amused by the German Tyrker, who is
so excited by his discovery of the grapes of his childhood
that he relapses into his native tongue, and by Thorhall
who calls on the Thor for whom he has been named to
produce a whale, only to find that it poisons the cooks.
We are impressed by the noble Gudrid, whose son Snorri
was the first white child known to have been born in
America, and who managed the rare feat of winning over
her mother-in-law. That she took the veil and went to
Rome is certainly an anachronism, and was probably in-
vented by one of the three bishops who descended from

The Evidence of History

her. The decision o Bjarni Grimolfson to perish rather
than break a promise he had made is entirely in keeping
with the stern ethics of ancient Norse life.

The sagas grew up in an age of struggle between primi-
tive beliefs and the organized church of Christendom.
The description of the witch whom Gudrid assisted is
classic for the insight it gives into pagan Norse folklore.
Its elaborate detail and sumptuousness of display forbid
us from believing that it really took place in primitive
Greenland. But even if we grant that some later admirer
of Gudrid inserted it here to glorify his heroine, this dra-
matic picture of Norse witchcraft is none the less substan-
tially true. In the story of Thorstein Ericson's death we
make the acquaintance of Iceland's exceedingly substan-
tial ghosts. When Eric the Red refused to start on a voyage
because it opened with a bad omen, he was obeying ancient
beliefs. Eric represents in his person the spirit of the old
gods, whose worship was closely tied to the family struc-
ture and was a prerogative of the viking chiefs. But he was
doomed to defeat, for Greenland could not refuse to fol-
low the times; its economic and social welfare was tied up
with religious conformity.

Again and again we are reminded that the voyages to
Vinland were not undertaken for the sheer love of adven-
ture and exploration. There is constant allusion to some-
thing called in Old Norse " landskostir/' the natural ad-
vantages of the land, which we have variously translated
as " natural character/' " the generosity of nature," and
" resources." These were very real advantages, which con-
tributed directly to the support of human life and to the
increase of human wealth. As the Greenland Saga quite
frankly puts it, " People were talking of the journey to
Vinland, for this seemed an open road to wealth and
honor." Places that could be lived in, and products that

Voyages to Vinland

could be turned to advantage, this was what Vinland
seemed to offer above all others. Even the chilly Stream-
fjord satisfied the basic requirements o Scandinavian ex-
istence in the colonies of the North Atlantic, for did it not
furnish " game on the mainland, birds' nests on the island,
and fish in the sea "?

The relations between Norsemen and the American
natives are among the most colorful and convincing fea-
tures of the saga narratives. Both versions agree that these
relations began with friendly barter and ended in de-
structive battle. It has been justly said that these encoun-
ters were the first between Europeans and savages in the
modern world. They form a very instructive introduction
to European colonial history. Without any previous train-
ing in how to treat natives, the Norsemen showed all the
traits of greed, unfairness, and exploitation that have char-
acterized European colonial expansion. Both versions
show, though in different ways, how the Norsemen failed
to give the savages full value for their goods. They show
the naive wonder of the savages at such unheard-of phe-
nomena as iron weapons, red cloth, milk, and fiery bulls.
They also show the mobility and warlike quality of these
savages, and the cruel measures to which the Europeans
resorted to protect themselves from their fury.

Most of the details of Skraeling life given in the sagas
can be verified among the Indians of eastern America.
John Cabot wrote of the Indians he met that " they use in
war bows, arrows, darts, lances, wooden clubs, and slings."
The mysterious ball which the Skraelings threw at the
Norsemen is explained by H, R. Schoolcraft, an authority
on the Ojibwa Indians, who says that they used a large
instrument of war consisting of a large heavy stone
wrapped in an animal pelt and put on a pole; Schoolcraft
calls it a " balista," which tallies with the saga. As School-

The Evidence of History

craft puts it, " brought down among a group of men on a
sudden it produced consternation and death/' Henry
Hudson tells about the Indians that " they brought many
beaver skinnes and other fine furres, which they would
have changed for redde gownes." This might have been
taken right out of the Karlsevni Saga. The food of the
sleeping savages, animal marrow mixed with blood, sug-
gests the " moose-butter " made of moose bones by the
Indians and used as provision on their journeys, according
to one early writer on Nova Scotia. The skin-covered boats
sound like Eskimo kayaks, but were entirely different in
construction and purpose. The Norsemen might have
mistaken birchbark for skin on a hasty inspection; but
there are also said to be Indian tribes who cover their
canoes with skins. The practice of sleeping under the
canoe which is noted in the saga was also observed by Car-
tier in the sixteenth century.

Many have tried to trace Norse influence on the lan-
guages, myths, and customs of the Indians, but all such
efforts have been dilettantish and fantastic. These savages
were certainly in no mood to be influenced by the Norse
invaders. After the first peaceful meetings, the whole re-
lationship was sealed in bloody combat. The Norsemen
might win a skirmish, but their iron weapons could not
offset their tremendous inferiority in numbers. They
lacked the crushing advantage which firearms conferred on
later European invaders of America.

The question has been asked: if the Norsemen discov-
ered America, why did they not settle it as well? Karlsevni
answered that question already in the eleventh century:
" Even though the country was richly endowed by na-
ture, they would always live in dread and turmoil because
of the enmity of those who lived there before/' This, and
nothing else, was the cause of the abrupt end of Norse

134 Voyages to vmiana

colonization in America. Always on the lookout for profit-
able lands, ready to push on into the wilderness i life
were possible there, they got as far as Greenland. Here
they stood on the threshold of a land of promise such as
no Scandinavian had ever before seen, and they were full
of the wonder of it; they called it Vinland, and added an
epithet, " the Good/' But between them and this dream
stood an implacable reality, the hostile peoples of Amer-
ica. The American Indian succeeded in beating off these
first European invaders in a skirmish that was a tiny cur-
tain raiser to the great battle of later ages.

The Norsemen in Greenland and Iceland told their
children the strange story of Vinland, but the impulse to
expansion was gone. In the course of time even the land-
marks of the journey grew faint in their memories, for
these things need to be kept alive by continuous and re-
peated sailings. Scattered efforts were made to maintain
contact, at least with Markland, where timber could be
fetched. A bishop sailed out to seek the lost souls of the
heathen. But nothing came of it; the chance of the vikings
to be something more than a flash in the pan of world his-
tory had come and gone, never to return.

WHERE WAS VINLAND?

The search for Vinland has exercised a strange fascination
on men's minds. Both lay and learned have spent many
eager hours trying to decipher the mystery of Vinland.
Discussion has gone merrily on ever since the Norse
sources were rediscovered, and the geography of the Amer-
ican continent more fully explored. Even sober scholars
have been given to extravagant and unfounded assertions
when dealing with this topic. Yet it must be granted that
in a century of study much useful information has been
turned up to throw light on the problem. Philologists,
historians, astronomers, naval experts, geographers, bot-
anists, and just plain enthusiasts have worked hand in
hand towards its clarification. No wholly satisfactory solu-
tion is in sight, and until some one undertakes a more
searching investigation of the entire Atlantic seaboard
than has yet been made, the problem seems to have been
pushed as far as the sources permit.

At first blush the Vinland sagas seem remarkably pre-
cise and detailed. They give distances and directions, de-
scriptions of the lands visited, and numerous details con-
cerning their climate, their flora and fauna, and their
native inhabitants. Yet in all of these details there is prob-
ably not a single one whose identification with recognized

1 36 Voyages to Vinland

places and phenomena on the American coast has not been
disputed. Not one of the numerous names in the sagas has
been identified with such certainty that it has won gen-
eral recognition among students of the subject. Vinland,
the most important, has by competent scholars been lo-
cated in such various places as Newfoundland (Hov-
gaard) , the mouth of the St. Lawrence (Steensby) , Nova
Scotia (Storm) , northern New England (ThorSarson) ,
Massachusetts (Fiske) , Rhode Island (Rafn) , New York
(Gathorne-Hardy) , and Virginia (Mjelde) . Most of these
identifications are accepted only by their originators, who
level at each other bitter charges of distorting the saga
text to fit preconceived theories. As a matter of fact, every
writer has disregarded something or other in the saga text;
if he did not, it would be impossible to identify anything.
Still no serious student takes the attitude of the Canadian
journalist who boldly wrote, " Let us take some liberties
with the old sagas, as they weren't accurate anyway/* (He
was trying to locate Vinland in Hudson Bay!)

For there is one thing on which all who have really
studied these sources are agreed: that through the mist of
their frequently confusing and inconclusive details we dis-
tinguish the outlines of the North American continent.
The eastern seaboard is exceedingly long and compli-
cated. Out of the great number of bays and capes and
islands which the vikings observed, only a few could be
kept in mind. If they made no more than the five voyages
recounted in the sagas, their memory could no longer be
refreshed by constant traversing of the course, and so dis-
tances and directions would naturally become distorted.
The intricacy of experience would gradually give way to
the simplicity of a good story.

The general resemblance that still remains is too strong
to be accidental. They sailed south and southwest from

The Evidence of History

Greenland; what land could they reach but America?
They found a shore that was stony and unprofitable, with
high mountains. They sailed on and found a more invit-
ing coast, with low-lying, wooded shores; and still farther
to the south, a fair and tempting land, teeming in all the
resources that made life possible. Here they found plants
and trees that were unfamiliar to them, and natives of a
warlike cast, who are too much like American Indians to
have been invented. Every one of these statements is found
in manuscripts written before any European suspected
the existence of America. One of them might have been
hit upon by fancy; but no imagination could assemble so
surprising an array of coincidences with realities now well
known, but then unsuspected. Especially not, if it is true
as one distinguished son of Iceland (Finnur Jonsson) has
declared, that his countrymen are noted for their lack of
imagination!

Out of the mountain of writings on this subject we shall
try to sift the most relevant facts and view with unbiased
eye the many theories that have been advanced. In brief
summary we shall present the details that may have some
value in identifying the places visited by the Norsemen.
These occur in connection with the voyages of Bjarni
Herjulfson (Chapter 2) , Leif Ericson (Chapter 4) , and
Thorvald Ericson (Chapter 5) in the Greenland Saga,
and of Thorfinn Karlsevni (Chapters 10-11) intheKarls-
evni Saga. Each of these accounts includes some scattered
information about sailing directions, distances traversed,
topography, latitude, climate, flora and fauna, and the
native inhabitants.

SAILING DIRECTIONS. When Bjarni Herjulfson was
blown to the American coast on his way from Iceland to
Greenland, he sighted first a shore that was marked by
small, wooded knolls. Before a southwest wind he sailed

138 Voyages to V inland

for two days to a second country, which was level, but well
wooded; then three days to a country with high moun-
tains, topped with ice, and then four days to the southern
tip of Greenland. Leif sailed the same course in reverse
order, and for the last leg the direction is given as south-
west. Thorvald explored the coast with Leif s camp as a
base, first to the west, then to the north and east. All of
these directions fit excellently with the general southwest
northeast slope of the American continent. They sug-
gest that the sons of Eric steered an outside course, off the
land, Karlsevni's voyage, on the other hand, started from
the Western Settlement in Greenland and sailed due
south, then southeast; this course would have brought
him to the southern tip of Labrador. From here there are
no sailing directions until he gets to his first winter camp
at Streamfjord; on his excursion to Vinland he sailed
south along the coast and to the east of it. When he re-
turned to find the lost Thorhall, he sailed from Stream-
fjord north, then west, then apparently south again. These
complicated directions strongly suggest that he had gotten
into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and skirted the north end
of Nova Scotia. But all the directions are vague, and must
be allowed a good deal of latitude.

DISTANCES. These are everywhere given in terms of
days' sailing (doegr) . Unfortunately there is vacillation in
Icelandic usage between twelve-hour days and twenty-
four hour days, and there was no accepted equivalent of a
day's sailing in terms of miles. On the basis of distances
given between Norway, Ireland, and Iceland estimates for
a twenty-four hour day's sailing have been made as ap-
proximately 150 nautical miles. On this basis Bjarni could
have made it from New England to Nova Scotia in the two
days given, from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland in three
days, and from Newfoundland to Greenland in four days.

The Evidence of History 1 39

But it looks suspicious that the numbers coincide so neatly
with the number of the country visited, and this suspicion
is strengthened when we see the distances given in the
Karlsevni Saga, which are everywhere " two days/* alter-
nating with a " long time/' The " two days " is impos-
sible, for nothing could be reached in that time; so the
distances of the Karlsevni Saga have to be disregarded en-
tirely, while something can be salvaged from those of the
other.

TOPOGRAPHY. The lands sighted show three successive
phases, which is clearly a simplification for purposes of
narration and memory. The northernmost was character-
ized by its high mountains and its stony, barren appear-
ance, and was known as Helluland. The Greenland Saga
adds that its mountains were topped by glaciers, and that
it was an island. To preserve the glaciers, some have moved
it to Baffin's Land. But the glaciers may simply be snow-
caps, and the whole description sounds most like Labra-
dor. Even Newfoundland is not excluded. The second
country was called Markland on account of its great for-
ests. Bjarni adds that it was level, Leif that it had broad,
white beaches, and a gently sloping shoreline, Thorfinn
that it had an island off the coast to the southeast which
they called Bear Isle. The topographic descriptions are
vague, because this kind of country was not what the
Norsemen were looking for, and no one cared to stay.
From Labrador to New England there are so many coasts
that would answer this general description that it can
hardly be limited to any one stretch. Scholars have placed
it in southeastern Labrador (Hovgaard, Steensby, etc.),,
in Newfoundland (Storm, Babcock) , and most commonly
in Nova Scotia because of its long, unbroken forest coast-
line.

Those regions that were actually lived in and explored

x^io Voyages to Vinland

are more thoroughly described. Between Markland and
Vinland proper Karlsevni investigated a large region that
is not noticed in the Greenland Saga, except incidentally.
There was a cape called Keelness, and long, sandy beaches
called Wonderstrands because it took so long to pass them.
Later he came to an island and a fjord with violent tidal
currents, called Streamfjord. There were mountains and
beautiful scenery, but severe winter weather and no grapes.
The sandy beaches suggest Massachusetts, but the other
features do not. We are led to the region between Nova
Scotia and Labrador, with its many inlets and tidal cur-
rents, its mountains and cold winters. A likely contender
for Wonderstrands is the southern coast of Labrador,
said to be long, low, and monotonous, while Stream-
fjord may be Chaleur Bay in New Brunswick (Hermanns-
son) . But these are only guesses. To the west of this re-
gion one should expect to find a forest wilderness, which
checks well enough with the estuary of the St. Lawrence.
The topography of Vinland proper includes an absence
of mountains (in spite of the Karlsevni Saga) . Bjarni saw
small, wooded knolls. Leif found an island to the north of
the mainland, with a channel between it and a cape jut-
ting out to the north. West of the cape were broad shallows.
Here he found a stream flowing into a lake and then into
the sea. Karlsevni also found a landlocked bay with a river
running into it and sand bars outside. Thorvald explored
this shore to the west and found lovely, wooded country,
with white, sandy beaches; the sea was full of islands and
great shallows. This whole topographic description points
unmistakably to the shores of southern New England;
north of this area the coast is generally rocky and jagged.
But the details are not clear enough to specify any par-
ticular locality. An intensive search has been made for
landlocked bays and lakes by the sea, but with little real

The Evidence of History

success; the changes of shoreline over a thousand years are
too considerable to make it likely that such impermanent
features would still be there. Rafn was intrigued by the
coincidence of name between Hop and Mount Hope Bay
in Rhode Island, while the irrepressible Horsford insisted
on Boston Back Bay and even proved it by digging up the
site of Leif s camp at Gerry's Landing!

LATITUDE* Many investigators have hoped that the as-
tronomical observation found in the Greenland Saga

(page 21) would help solve the problem. No feature of
the story has been more ardently discussed or ingeniously
investigated. Leif and his men noticed that the days in
Vinland were much longer in winter than they had been
in Iceland* They noted specifically that on the shortest
day of the year the sun's course ran all the way from a
point on the horizon known in Iceland as " dagmalastaft,"
i.e., breakfast point, to another known as " eyktarstaS,"
i.e., afternoon point.

Unfortunately no record has remained to tell us ex-
actly where these points were. A passage in the Icelandic
ecclesiastical code gives a definition of " eyktarstaS " which
has given rise to endless astronomical discussion. The
most reliable, but by no means conclusive result of this
calculation is that the observation must have been made
south of the 4Qth degree of latitude, which crosses north-
ern Newfoundland. But there is little help in this, for no
one can reasonably place Vinland north of Newfound-
land. Besides, why should Greenlanders be so amazed at
the change in the sun's height just four days' sailing from
their own country?

A passage in the Edda of Snorri Sturluson has been less
considered, but seems much more pertinent. It states that
the sun sets at " eyktarstaS " at the beginning of winter

(probably about October 14 in Iceland) . This brings out

Voyages to Vinland

the real bearing of the passage and the only meaning that
makes sense from mariners without sextant or compass.
They were simply trying to express how much longer the
day was in this region than at home, for just imagine!
here the sun was as high in the dead of winter as in
Iceland at the beginning of winter. It is no precise obser-
vation, but rather a general comparison which suggests
that they were a goodly distance from home*

CLIMATE. A salient feature of Vinland was its remark-
able climate. Karlsevni knew that Streamfjord was not
Vinland because of its severe winter. Both versions agree
that there was no winter frost, and that the grass hardly
withered, so that cattle could graze outdoors, which would
be a treat to most Scandinavian cows. Exceptionally, such
conditions can be found in many places along the Ameri-
can coast, but are generally improbable until one gets
south of Cape Cod. John Fiske asserts that the winter o
1889-1890 was just such a one at Boston, and Gray insists
that it is common on Martha's Vineyard. As a permanent
feature of the winter climate it is not appropriate north of
Virginia. But it is unthinkable that the Norsemen would
not have had more and other things to report had they
gotten so far south. The substance of this statement is that
the winters were very different from those of Greenland,
and it made a better story to say that there was no snow,
than to say that there was some, but not very much snow.

FLORA AND FAUNA. Most of the controversy over the
location of Vinland has raged about the flora, particularly
the grapes and the unsown wheat. The grapes are the
ancient and unvarying characteristic of Vinland, attested
by Adam of Bremen, by the name given to the country,
and by the unanimous report of the sagas. In both versions
the grapes are found by non-Scandinavians, a German in
the Greenland Saga, a most improbable pair of Scotchmen

The Evidence of History

in the Karlsevni Saga. Some one had to identify them as
grapes, for the Norsemen had probably never seen the
fruit growing, though they had long been acquainted with
its end product, the proud and aristocratic drink known as
wine. It is not surprising that both they and their descend-
ants should have had vague notions about these berries,
even to the extent of believing that they grew on trees and
could be preserved through the winter for transport in the
spring, if this is what the saga really means.

Astonishing attempts have been made to explain away
the finding of grapes by scholars who either are skeptical
of the veracity of these accounts, or who wish to place
Vinland north of the known limit of the grape. It has been
suggested that the grapes and the self-sown wheat are
merely loans from classic tales about the Fortunate Isles,
or that the grape was really the mountain cranberry (Nor-
wegian tyttebcer) , a plant with which every Norseman
was and is familiar from childhood. All this in spite of the
fact that nearly every explorer of New England and Can-
ada from later times (Cartier, Lescarbot, Denys, Cham-
plain, Hudson) mentions wild grapes as an outstanding
feature of these regions. Along the coast the grape has
grown wild as fair north as Passamaquoddy Bay between
Maine and New Brunswick down to this very day and was
formerly in extensive household use.

The self-sown wheat of the sagas, also mentioned by
Adam of Bremen, has been identified as maize by learned
European scholars who obviously never saw that familiar
American plant. Correspondingly, a learned American
scholar has said that it must have been lyme-grass (elymus
arenaria) , which grows everywhere in Iceland and Green-
land to this day. The likeliest guess is that it was wild rice,
which grows as far north as Newfoundland. Whatever the
Norsemen saw, it must have been identical with what

144 Voyages to Vinland

Jacques Cartier saw in 1534, when he spoke o " fields of
wild corn " with " ears like rye and the grain like oats "
that " looked as if it had been sown and cultivated."

The mysterious mosur tree, which bobs up in both ver-
sions, must have been some sort of rare and precious wood.
A Swedish word masbjork and a German Maserbirke refer
to veined birch. A drinking bowl spoken of in one saga as
made of this material probably was of the type still seen in
Norway, made from the protuberances or knobs which
grow on birch trees. Fernald believes it was canoe birch,
others that it was bird's eye maple.

Most of the fauna is of little help in determining the
Vinland locale. Everywhere along the coast there is or was
an abundance of fish, including the halibut mentioned in
the Karlsevni Saga. The same is true of the whales caught.
Nor are the woods teeming with animals especially char-
acteristic, even if the word " dyr " is taken to mean specifi-
cally " deer. 15 Only the salmon mentioned in the Green-
land Saga may be helpful: while today it stays north of
Cape Cod, it formerly ventured as far south as the mouth
of the Delaware.

NATIVES, Even the natives of Vinland have been the
subject of dispute. Because the word " skraeling," used of
them in the sagas, is nowadays applied to the Eskimos,
some have thought that they must have been Eskimos. But
there is absolutely no evidence that Eskimos have ever
lived south of Labrador, and the details of the sagas point
to a more warlike and enterprising race. The word itself
is one of contempt, like " barbarian " or " savage/' which
has here been used to translate it. It is derived from a root
which means " dried up " and is found in such words as
Norwegian skral "poor, miserable/' Icelandic skrtela
" dry up/' skr&lna " wither/' The word skraeling itself is
still used in Iceland to mean a barbarian, while in Nor-

The Evidence of History 14.5

wegian dialects it contemptuously refers to a weakling.
This was the indiscriminate term applied by the Norse-
men to the first savages they met, the Indians of North
America, a fine example of European self-esteem. Two
centuries later the word was still remembered, but no
Greenlander was alive who had seen an Indian. Then it
was natural to apply the word to the new savages who
started crowding in from the north.

There can accordingly be no doubt that the natives
were Indians, perhaps of the now extinct Beothuk or Mic-
mac tribes. But even so they do not help much in localiz-
ing our Vinland.

What conclusions can we draw from all these criteria?
The evidence may seem confusing, but it points in one
direction. The vikings unquestionably coasted down the
eastern seaboard of North America. Their descriptions in-
dicate that they had seen Labrador and Newfoundland,
the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and Nova Scotia on their way.
But their Vinland could not have been any of these, for
grapes do not grow north of Passamaquoddy Bay. And it
was farther south still, for in this region the winters are
too cold. It could hardly be south of Delaware, how-
ever, for this is the southern limit of the salmon. All cri-
teria converge on the Middle Atlantic coast from south-
ern New England to Delaware as the promised land of the
Norsemen; there is nothing in the sources that permits
us to be more specific. We can only say: somewhere on the
south New England or Middle Atlantic coast Leif Ericson
and Thorfinn Karlsevni stepped ashore on the American
continent, and saw that it was good.

IN SEARCH OF RELICS

The eyes of Americans were first opened to the Norse
discovery o their country by a ponderous tome which
issued from the Royal Danish Society of Antiquaries.
This magnificent volume was edited by Carl Christian
Rafn, secretary of the Society, in 1837 an( i entitled Anti-
quitates Americanae. It contained the original saga texts,
with Latin and Danish translations, but it did not stop
there. Rafn was no dry-as-dust, scholar; he was a character-
istic son of an age full of enthusiasm for all that was old
and remote and simple. He had never been in America,
but he was convinced that the vikings must have left relics
behind on American shores. So sure of this was he that
when he got information from American correspondents
about ruined towers and inscribed stones, he at once con-
cluded that they were of Norse origin, and included them
in his great work. With naive, childlike delight he ac-
cepted everything that came to hand.

Both in their original publication and in a multitude
of popularizers Rafn's ideas made a tremendous impact
in New England. Higginson writes, " I can well remem-
ber, as a boy, the excitement produced among the Har-
vard professors when the ponderous volume made its ap-
pearance on the library table/' New England's hallowed
coasts became doubly sacred as the scene of fascinating

The Evidence of History 147

viking exploits. Rafn's unhesitating identifications of the
very spots where the Norsemen had landed were food for
the imagination such as New England had never known.
Prominent men delivered lectures on the subject, and
poets were touched by this evidence of white life long be-
fore the pilgrims.

An age was bound to follow in which Rafn's uncritical
identifications produced a reaction of disbelief, as these
were gradually shown to be wrong. A suspicion grew up
in many minds that the whole story was mere froth, be-
cause its early advocates had tried to prove too much.

These doubts have been fully set to rest by the labors of
a generation of more critical scholars, led by the Nor-
wegian historian Gustav Storm. In his essay, Studies in
the Finland Voyages, published in 1887, he tried to clear
away some of the debris by distinguishing sharply between
fact and fiction. He reacted vigorously against Rafn's un-
critical acceptance of everything that might be connected
with the Norse discovery. Storm's study challenged others
to examine the problem anew, so that today a whole liter-
ature of sound scholarship has grown up around the sub-
ject. These studies have made the position of the Norse
discoveries in world history clearer and more assured. But
they have also dissipated some of the many fictions that
once grew luxuriantly around the discovery.

While these fictions have been dissipated in the eyes of
scholars, many of them linger on in the popular mind.
The Norse voyages to America have carried an imaginative
appeal to the American public which has affected scholar,
poet and layman alike. The general ignorance of the
sources and facts in the case has surrounded them with
obscurity and mystery.

We have seen how vague and uncertain are the conclu-
sions that can be reached about the location of Vinland;

1x8 Voyages to Vinland

but the sources do not permit a conscientious student to
be more specific. If only the Norsemen had been so con-
siderate as to leave behind a few authentic relics! There
are plenty in Greenland; that there should be none in
America has seemed too harsh and disappointing a fact to
many enthusiastic souls, who have thrown all their ener-
gies into the search for Norse remains on the American
continent.

We may be sure that if the Norsemen had been able to
gain any sort of lasting foothold in America, there would
have been authentic remains. But the sagas give us no war-
rant to believe that they established residences here. The
sagas tell us a story of failure; they would not have forgot-
ten a success. The brief winter residences of the vikings
can hardly be expected to have left permanent traces.

In spite of this fact the spinning of fictions goes merrily
on. It started with the enthusiastic and romantic Rafn,
was encouraged by the New England poets, and an army
of amateur archeologists; in modern times it has experi-
enced a revival among the Norwegian immigrants of the
Middle West. We are here faced with an intensely inter-
esting chapter in the cultural history of America, which
still awaits its chronicler. It bears testimony to the human
desire for certainty and conviction, and to the perennial
fascination of the viking discovery.

Rafn's most important piece of evidence that the land-
fall of the Norsemen had been in New England was a stone
generally known as the Dighton Writing Rock, near
Dighton, Massachusetts. This had been observed as early
as 1680, and noticed with interest by such famous men
as Cotton Mather and the English philosopher George
Berkeley. The earliest theory was that its inscriptions had
been made by Phoenician visitors to America. In 1789 a
copy of it was shown to George Washington, who " smiled,

The Evidence of History 149

and said he believed the learned Gentlemen were mis-
taken: and added, that as he had so often examined the
rude way of writing practised by the Indians of Virginia,
he had no doubt the inscriptions were made, long ago, by
some natives of America."

Rafn accepted the stone as of Norse origin, though he
had never seen it, and on the basis of crude drawings even
managed to read a legend in runes, the old Scandinavian
alphabet, saying that " Thorfinn and his 151 men took pos-
session of the land/' His imaginative assistant, Finn Mag-
nusen, found pictured on it the prow of a ship, a disman-
tled vessel, a shield, and a heifer lying down. With a liberal
use of fancy he worked this into a design representing
" Thorfmn's ship, with his wife seated on the stone, hold-
ing in her hand the key of the conjugal dwelling; beside
her their three-year-old son. A cock is crowing. Then sud-
denly approaching war is indicated; Thorfinn seizes his
shield, tries to protect himself against the approaching
Skraelings, who assail the Norsemen armed with clubs or
branches, bows and arrows/' He modestly adds that " cer-
tain other features of the inscription must be left unex-
plained/*

From imaginative scholar to imaginative poet is not a
long step, and we are not surprised that this theory made
the Dighton Rock celebrated in song and story. P. C Sind-
ing was moved to write these fervid lines:

No shore to which the Northmen came
But kept some token of their fame;
On the rough surface of a rock,
Unmoved by time or tempest's shock,
In Runic letters, Thorwald drew *
A record of his gallant crew;
And these rude letters still are shown
Deep chiseled in the flinty stone.

150 Voyages to Vinland

A greater poet, Sidney Lanier, alluded to it in his famous
" Psalm of the West/' when he pictured the Norsemen as
the first American settlers. He placed Leif's camp on the
Taunton River, where lies the Dighton Rock:

Then Leif, bold son of Eric the Red,
To the South of the West doth flee

Past slaty Helluland is sped,
Past Markland's woody lea,

Till round about fair Vinland's head,
Where Taunton helps the sea,

The Norseman calls, the anchor falls,

The mariners hurry a-strand:
They wassail with fore-drunken skals

Where prophet wild grapes stand;
They lift the Leifsbooth's hasty walls

They stride about the land

One American poet, however, remained unimpressed,
and made delightful satire out of the whole business. In
his Biglow Papers, Second Series (1862) , James Russell
Lowell pretended to turn the interests of his naive anti-
quarian parson, Homer Wilbur, M.A., to the subject of
Norse inscriptions. Wilbur announces with great excite-
ment that he has found a hitherto unknown " runick in-
scription " on the east bank of Bushy Brook in North
Jaalam. He solemnly explains that there are three kinds
of "runick inscriptions/* '* i. Those which are under-
stood by the Danish Royal Society of Northern Antiqua-
ries, and Professor Rafn, their Secretary; 2. Those which
are comprehensible only by Mr. Rafn; and 3. Those which
neither the Society, Mr. Rafn, nor anybody else can be
said in any definite sense to understand, and which accord-
ingly offer peculiar temptations to enucleating sagacity*

The Evidence of History , 151

These last are naturally deemed the most valuable by in-
telligent antiquaries, and to this class the stone now in my
possession fortunately belongs/'

Wilbur then goes on to decipher the inscription, chiefly
by the process of first making one up and then trying to
find it in the characters engraved on the stone; to test its
accuracy he turns the stone upside down and finds that it
reads exactly the same! This mock inscription informs
an eager world that here the Bjarni Grimolfson of our
saga (see Chapter 12) " first drank cloud-brother (i.e.,
tobacco smoke) through child-of-land-and-water (i.e., a
reed stem.) " " The Saga, it will be remembered, leaves
this Bjarni to (his) fate ... on board a sinking ship.
... It is doubly pleasant, therefore, to meet with this
proof that the brave old man arrived safely in Vinland,
and that his declining years were cheered by the respect-
ful attentions of the dusky denizens of our then uninvaded
forest. . . ."

Lowell's satire was a just one, and well deserves reading
in full. Washington's belief that the Indians had a hand
in the stone has been confirmed by later research; but oth-
ers, too, explorers and fishermen of modern times, have
here left their mark. The Norsemen alone are utterly in-
nocent of any connection with the stone.

Another piece of evidence accepted by Rafn was a ru-
ined tower at Newport, Rhode Island, which he asserted
was built in a style of architecture found in twelfth-cen-
tury Scandinavia. He believed that it was part of an Ice-
landic chapel, although no chapel built in this style has
ever been found either in Iceland or Greenland. After a
time it was shown that this tower had once been a wind-
mill, built by Governor Arnold about 1675.

In 1831 a skeleton was uncovered near Fall River, Mas-

152 Voyages to Vinland

saclmsetts, with a brass breast-plate, a quiver of brass
arrows, and a brass belt. Unfortunately it was burned be-
fore it could be examined by experts, but there is no rea-
son to believe that it had not belonged to a quite ordinary
Indian. In the general excitement over Rafn's book, how-
ever, some were ready to see even this as a viking relic.
One day in 1838 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was
deeply interested in Scandinavia, was riding on the sea-
shore at Newport and got the idea of connecting the New-
port tower with the skeleton. To him these were not mat-
ters of belief, but they furnished him the theme of a poem
on the Norse discovery. This was the " Skeleton in
Armor/* a rollicking but extremely un-Scandinavian bal-
lad, which tells the story of a viking lover and his maiden.
Hollow-eyed and gaunt, the viking rises from his grave
to haunt the poet and make him tell his tale: " I was a
Viking old! " Born " by the wild Baltic's strand," he
" wooed the blue-eyed maid/' But alas, " she was a Prince's
child, I but a Viking wild/' So the only way he could have
his desire was to flee with her across the sea: " Through
the wild hurricane, Bore I the maiden."

" Three weeks we westward bore,
And when the storm was o'er
Cloud-like we saw the shore

Stretching to leeward;
There for my lady's bower
Built I the lofty tower,
Which to this very hour,
Stands looking seaward.

" There lived we many years;
Time dried the maiden's tears;
She had forgot her fears,
She was a mother;

The Evidence of History

Death closed her mild blue eyes,
Under that tower she lies;
Ne'er shall the sun arise
On such another!

" Still grew my bosom then,
Still as a stagnant fen!
Hateful to me were men,

The sunlight hateful!
In the vast forest here,
Clad in my warlike gear,
Fell I upon my spear,

Oh, death was grateful!

" Thus, seamed with many scars,
Bursting these prison bars,
Up to its native stars
My soul ascended!
There from the flowing bowl
Deep drinks the warrior's soul,
Skoal! to the Northland! Skoal! "
Thus the tale ended.

A desperate attempt to find the exact location of Leif 's
landfall was undertaken in the late eighties by a one-time
Harvard professor of chemistry, Eben Horsford (1818-
1 893) , who had made a fortune from the sale of Horsford's
Acid Phosphate, a popular nerve tonic. He spent thou-
sands of dollars trying to prove that Leif 's landlocked lake
was none other than Boston Back Bay. At Gerry's Landing
he dug up what he claimed to be the site of Leif *s camp,
with a ring of charred stones in the middle. He brought
over two Icelandic scholars to investigate it for him, and
although they declared that no certainty could be reached,
Horsford placed a tablet on the spot announcing it as a
fact. He was also intrigued by the similarity of Norum-

l rA Voyages to Vinland

bega, now a suburb of Boston, to the name of Norway,
and in 1889 erected a tower there to the memory of the
Norse discoverers. His etymological fancies went even fur-
ther, to the derivation of the name America from that of
Eric the Red, by way of some Indians living in Central
America! But Horsford's enthusiasm went unrewarded;
he found no followers, and today his expensive monu-
ments and his beautifully illustrated volumes are mere
curiosities. We must conclude, in the words of Whittier,

Norumbega proved again
A shadow and a dream.

The Dighton Rock was not the only inscribed stone
known to Rafn's generation. At Tiverton and Portsmouth
in Rhode Island there are several rocks which excited the
fantasy of the learned Danes. When they found a hook that
looked like a runic L, they naturally assumed that Leif
had here left his initial, while anything like a T they took
to be a reminiscence of Tyrker! In the words of Professor
Delabarre: " It is an example of solemn silliness posing as
serious science/' From the study of these and a large num-
ber of other such rocks along the Atlantic seaboard it has
gradually emerged that the Indians practised a rude sort
of rock carving, which never reached the level of alpha-
betic writing, but consisted of crude human figures, rep-
resentations of common objects, and just meaningless
scrawls. Nearly all of these rocks have at some time fed the
dream of finding Norse remains on the Atlantic seaboard.

Whittier humorously alluded to one of them in his
poem, " The Double-Headed Snake of Newbury/' a stone
at West Newbury, Massachusetts, whose inscription has
turned out to be nothing but natural cracks in the rock.
He says of a mythical two-headed snake investigated by
Cotton Mather, that he does not know

The Evidence of History 155

Whether he lurked in the Oldtown fen

Or the gray earth-flax of the Devil's Den,

Or swam in the wooded Artichoke,

Or coiled by the Northman's Written Rock . . .

A fragment of stone found at Bradford, Massachusetts,
and shaped something like a human foot, was imagined
by some to be the remains of a Norse statue. This gave
occasion to Whittier's poem ** The Norsemen," in which
he calls it

Gift from the cold and silent Past!

Who from its bed of primal rock

First wrenched thy dark, unshapely block?

A spell is in this old gray stone,
My thoughts are with the Past alone!

What sound comes up the Merrimac?
What sea-worn barks are those which throw
The light spray from each rushing prow?
Have they not in the North Sea's blast
Bowed to the waves the straining mast?

Bared to the sun and soft warm air,
Streams back the Norsemen's yellow hair.
I see the gleam of axe and spear,
The sound of smitten shields I hear,
Keeping a harsh and fitting time
To Saga's chant and Runic rhyme.

The wolf beneath the Arctic moon
Has answered to that startling rune;
The Gael has heard its stormy swell,
The light Frank knows its summons well;
lona's sable-stoled Culdee
Has heard it sounding o'er the sea,
And swept, with hoary beard and hair,
His altar's foot in trembling prayer!

156 Voyages to Vinland

In 1956 a rock finally turned up with undeniable runes
on it, a stone on No Man's Land off the Massachusetts
coast. Here was the name of Leif Ericson with the date
" MI " (1001) and some obscure letters which were in-
terpreted as " Vinland." Unfortunately the Icelanders in
the year 1001 were not much inclined to make runic in-
scriptions on stone; they could hardly have known the
Roman method of numbering; and they would not have
used either the runes or the spellings of this inscription.
It is much more likely that it was made by one of Leif *s
modern admirers than by Leif himself.

The most ambitious runic stone in all America, how-
ever, is one that has practically no connection with the
Vinland voyages, and is amazingly remote from the At-
lantic seaboard. This is the Kensington Stone, found in
1898 near Alexandria, Minnesota. It was promptly dis-
missed as a fraud, and universally so regarded until its
cause was championed by Mr. Hjalmar Ruud Holand,
now a resident of Ephraim, Wisconsin. It contains a long,
narrative inscription of a kind never seen in Scandinavia,
written in a strange kind of Swedo-Norwegian, with most
unorthodox runic characters, all chiseled with meticulous
precision. It is dated 1362 and tells the tale of a party of
Swedes and Norwegians " on a journey of exploration
from Vinland to the west/'

Mr. Holand has presented some very plausible argu-
ments in its favor; he has shown that it is not lightly to be
dismissed. His notable talent of persuasion and his charrn
of manner have won him a great following, to whom this
is a sacred stone. But he has not yet succeeded in winning
over any first-rate authority on runes or medieval Scandi-
navian languages. The Scandinavian authorities are, In
fact, unnecessarily sniffish about it, which may be partly
due to a common European suspicion of American frauds.

The Evidence of History 157

As the Scotsman Samuel Laing once wrote apropos the
Dighton Rock, " The Americans dearly love a little hoax."
But the suspicion of the authorities is also due to the
strange nature of the stone itself, its message, its language,
its runes, its location, and the circumstances of its discov-
ery. Whether one regards it as spurious or genuine, how-
ever, its undeniable presence in Alexandria, Minnesota, is
very hard to explain. If it is a hoax, it has not yet been un-
masked; if it is a voice from the past, its title to speak is still
in doubt.

It has encouraged a search for Norse relics in the Mid-
dle West as intense as that in New England of an earlier
day. In recent years axes and spear points and other objects
have been turning up as regularly as runic rocks once did
in New England. Supposed Norse relics have been dug out
of American soil in widely scattered parts of the Middle
West, and the Mandan Indians of North Dakota are
claimed as viking offspring. Many of these relics are inter-
esting enough, but none of them have been dug up under
conditions that positively eliminated fraud or misconcep-
tions. They are not so distinctive that some other explana-
tion cannot be given of their origin. Nor has it yet been
explained why the Norsemen should take any interest in
exploring the interior of our continent; their entire lives
were lived along the coast, and while they were skilled sea-
men, they were poor land travellers.

The last few years have indeed seen a whole crop of
books which claim to cast light on certain phases of these
questions, but which only seem to add to the darkness. One
writer proclaims in a book entitled " The Viking and the
Red Man " that half the vocabulary of the Algonquin
language was derived from Old Norse. The evidence seems
impressive until one discovers that the forms given are
misquoted and misunderstood, and that the methods of

Voyages to Vinland

comparison are unscientific and antiquated. Another en-
thusiast fixes upon Portsmouth Harbor as the Streamf jord
of our saga and publishes a beautifully illustrated book
with the reassuring title " The Truth about Leif Erics-
son/' He proceeds on the premise that the sagas tell " noth-
ing but the truth," even though he does not know whether
the characters of the saga " could themselves write in long
hand." A third contributor to the folklore of the Norse dis-
coveries has located runic inscriptions up and down the
New England coast by an ingenious technique of inter-
preting geometrical designs on axes and scratches on stones
as secret runes.

It is apparent that the Norse discovery has played an
important role in the affections and imaginations of the
American people. Norwegian-Americans have appropri-
ated Leif Ericson from the Icelanders as a kind of national
saint, a symbol of group assertion. But even aiftong old-
stock Americans these early viking explorers have been
enveloped in an intensely romantic haze. Scandinavians
and Americans alike whose enthusiasm has been unham-
pered by a critical sense have seen vast perspectives of
forgotten Norse colonies in the American wilderness, a reg-
ular Norse empire stretching from Massachusetts to Min-
nesota. They have more or less unconsciously wanted to
magnify the importance of the Norse discoveries* Scan-
dinavians could not understand that their ancestors missed
so great an opportunity, and Americans have been puzzled
that any one could see our grand country and remain so
uninterested.

While most or all of these attempts to find Norse relics
on American soil are clearly will-o'-the-wisps, they have
been a boojpt to poets and a stimulus to American imagi-
nativeness. Many have felt a gratitude for these relics

The Evidence of History 1 59

which was best expressed by Whittier in his poem ** The
Norsemen ":

Yet, for this vision o the Past,
This glance upon its darkness cast.
My spirit bows in gratitude
Before the Giver of all good,
"Who fashioned so the human mind,
That from the waste of Time behind,
A simple stone, or mound of earth,
Can summon the departed forth;
Quicken the Past to life again,
The Present lose in what hath been,
And in their primal freshness show
The buried forms of long ago.

RESULTS AND SIGNIFICANCE

The Norse discoveries set up strangely few reverberations
in world history. We have seen why they fell short of
permanence; but this does not explain why so little knowl-
edge of them filtered through to the rest of Europe. At
the time of the actual discoveries there was intimate
knowledge of them in Greenland, and pretty full informa-
tion available in Iceland. People in Norway must have
known about them, and we see that soon after the middle
of the eleventh century the news got as far as Denmark.
Very much abbreviated and garbled it reached the rest
of Europe in Adam of Bremen's ponderous work. Why
did this news fail to stir the European imagination and
awaken the spirit of enterprise?

The real reason was that in the year 1000 Europe was
not ready to discover America. Europe and Scandinavia
consisted of a mass of petty states, bickering and fighting
among themselves and wholly occupied with internal
problems. The kings were often nominal or temporary
heads, whose authority was none too secure. None of the
European nations was very old, and they were just begin-
ning to acquire some slight stability. Four hundred years
later they had grown large and strong; kings sat securely
on their thrones as the wielders of unlimited power, with.

The Evidence of History 161

huge national treasuries at their command. England,
France, Spain, and Portugal had accumulated large capi-
tals which could be used to finance expeditions of explora-
tion and settlement. Firearms made the subjugation of
native populations easy. Even so, it took the European im-
perialists a century of heartbreaking failures before they
gained a secure foothold on this continent.

The rise of the larger nations of southern and central
Europe coincided with a decline in the fortunes of the
small ones in the North. Just as the new age of exploration
and enlightenment was about to dawn in the rest of Eu-
rope, the Greenland settlements were disintegrating. Ice-
land lost her sovereignty in 1262, and much of her cul-
tural vigor in the century that followed. The sagas passed
out of oral tradition, and settled into the comparative ob-
scurity of the manuscripts. These were still retained, and
frequently copied, but had to compete in the interests of
the people with foreign romances. Norwegian cultural
life was struck a drastic blow by the Black Death and the
successive unions with Sweden and Denmark during the
fourteenth century. Linguistic changes isolated Norway
from Iceland, and after the union of Calmar in 1397 both
countries gradually fell under the dominance of the Dan-
ish crown. All of these countries became marginal with
respect to Europe, for they had no center of gravity within
themselves to assert their ancient traditions. When the age
of exploration came, no one looked to them for informa-
tion about great discoveries. Meanwhile the story of Vin-
land gathered dust in the archives of Iceland.

Then one day in 1492 a Genoese sailor with the fixed
idea that he could sail west to reach the Indies ran across
the same continent that Leif had skirted five centuries be-
fore. After Columbus came a horde of explorers and con-
quistadores to-plant the flags of Spain, Portugal, England,

Voyages to V inland

and France in its virgin soil. A new world had emerged, to
which all Europe must orient its existence.

But the connection between this new world and the
ancient explorations of the Northmen remained unknown
and almost unsuspected, even in Iceland. Those who had
not forgotten about Greenland thought of it as lying " at
the western boundary of Europe " and they did not get
much enlightenment from Adam of Bremen's old history
when it was first printed in 1595. Throughout the six-
teenth century the Danish kings tried vainly to re-establish
the contact with Greenland. Not until the seventeenth
century did intimations begin to bob up of a renewed
knowledge of the old northern route. The geographer
Ortelius wrote in 1601 that the inhabitants of Iceland and
Greenland must have been the first to discover America; a
Danish clergyman alluded to Vinland in a bit of doggerel
verse from 1608; the famous Dutch jurist, Hugo Grotius,
credited the Norsemen with the discovery of America
in 1642, and even maintained that the Indians were their
descendants. King Christian IV of Denmark sent a series
of expeditions to Greenland soon after 1600, and in 1619
he sent Jens Munk to discover the Northwest Passage, but
apparently without any realization that Scandinavians
had sailed these waters before.

The real story of Vinland had to come from Iceland her-
self. In 1643 t ^ ie scholarly Arngrimur Jonsson, who had
latinized his name to Arngrimvs lonas, issued his Specimen
Islandia historicum in Amsterdam. Here the ancient
saga was for the first time interpreted in the light of the
new discoveries. The original manuscripts were still hid-
den away in Iceland; but about this time they began mi-
grating out of their old repositories by the native hearth
to the royal libraries of Denmark, It remained for the
most learned Icelander of his day to give the world the full

The Evidence of History 163

text of the sagas. This was the robust Thormod Tor-
faeus, who was employed by the King of Denmark as Royal
Historiographer of Norway.

Torfaeus published in 1705 the first complete account
of the discovery in a work that was written in Latin and
won a wide circulation in Europe. In the course of his
work he dropped more than a hint to the King of Den-
mark that these discoveries gave him the right to claim a
part of the North American continent. Everyone else was
getting colonies, why should not Denmark? But it was too
late. Stronger powers had already established themselves
in America, and Torfaeus' book remained of purely aca-
demic interest. This dream of American colonies haunted
the Danish mind even a century later, when another
scholar, Finn Magnusen, declared '* that if the Icelandic
language . . . had been understood at the Danish court
three hundred years ago, our country might now perhaps
have been one of Europe's mightiest states and the world
might have looked quite different from now."

But these regrets were idle, and the Danish crown never
tried to assert its domain farther than Greenland, which
fell to it as a fruit of its union with Norway.

Instead, Danish scholars once tried to show that there
was a vital connection between the Norse discoveries and
the later feats of Christopher Columbus. The idea was
first suggested by a Danish geographer, Malte-Brun, in
1 81 2. A year later it was taken up by Finn Magnusen, who
discovered that Columbus claimed to have made a voyage
into the Iceland seas in 1477; Magnusen believed that on
this voyage he met Icelanders who could have told him
about the Norse voyages. This appealing idea was accepted
by Rafn and others, and was made much of by certain
American writers. In this way the idea, which started as a
scholar's fancy, has become almost a popular dogma. The

I$A Voyages to V inland

notion that Leif Ericson and Christopher Columbus
should have touched hands across the centuries is so dra-
matic that it carries almost immediate conviction. In a
poem of 1844 James Russell Lowell represented Colum-
bus as saying:

I brooded on the wise Athenian's tale

Of happy Atlantis, and heard Bjorne's keel

Crunch the gray pebbles of the Vinland shore . . .

Unfortunately this is another of the attractive but il-
lusory will-o'-the-wisps that surround the theme of Vin-
land. Adam of Bremen's account would hardly have
tempted Columbus to seek out this " island " to the north
of Greenland, one day's sail from the frozen icepack. No
evidence has made it probable that there remained any
information in fifteenth-century Rome concerning Vin-
land, This leaves us only one possible connection, sug-
gested by a note Columbus is claimed to have written.
This is quoted by his son Fernando and begins " In the
month of February 1477 I sailed a hundred leagues be-
yond the island of Tile . . /' As this Tile must have been
Thule, a medieval name for Iceland, this opens a vista of
possible connections which have been utilized to the full.

But the whole structure is based on a series of far-fetched
assumptions, every one of which has to be true to prove the
point. We have to assume that Columbus really wrote this
note (which is disputed by many) ; that if so, he was telling
the truth (he was not above boasting now and then about
things he had not done) ; that if he went to Iceland, he
got most of his facts wrong; that he never again mentioned
having been there; that he did not just sail past Iceland, as
the note clearly says, but went on shore; that he was able
to find natives handy who could talk Latin; that he hap-
pened to ask the natives about Vinland, and found some

The Evidence of History 165

one who had read the rare, ancient manuscripts that told
about it; that the products of Vinland (grapes, wheat,
furs) seemed attractive enough to be worth bothering
about by a man who was dreaming of the silks and spices
of the Indies; that in all his impassioned speeches to the
rulers of Europe, trying every means to persuade them that
there was land to the west, he failed to use this argument;
and most mysterious of all, that knowing about the loca-
tion of Vinland, he sailed in an almost exactly opposite
direction, far to the south!

The latest effort to bridge all these gaps of missing evi-
dence flows from the incisive pen of Vilhjalmur Stefans-
son, famous arctic explorer. He believes in a widespread
plot on the part of Pope and Spaniards to suppress knowl-
edge of the Norse discoveries and their effect on Colum-
bus. This theory has the admirable virtue of explaining
everything without being in the least capable of proof.
One wonders just how much Spain really had to fear from
possible counterclaims to the American continent by the
Danish king. Stefansson is more successful in his attempts
to establish the possibility of Columbus's visit to Iceland.
He shows that Columbus 's statements about Iceland are
not as absurd as some have thought and that his biogra-
phers are more reliable than they seem. But he does not
show that the obvious medieval familiarity with Green-
land carried with it a knowledge of Vinland, or that Co-
lumbus in any way added to his stock of information on
this subject by his presumed voyage to Iceland. There is
still that hurdle which stopped Gustav Storm, who be-
lieved that Columbus had been to Iceland, but could find
no effect of this voyage on his American discoveries. Ste-
fansson proceeds to count noses among previous writers on
the subject, but the fact that a majority have believed in
Columbus's voyage to Iceland proves very little when we

i66 Voyages to V inland

begin to consider the quality of some of those noses.

Even though the Norse voyages could hardly have had
any significance for Columbus, it is not impossible that
some oral knowledge of lands to the west circulated among
the seamen of the North. There was much eager search-
ing for information about the unknown West in England
in the fifteenth century, and it is striking that John Cabot
started from the port of Bristol, which was the center of an
illicit English trade with Iceland, and not improbably
with Greenland. But these problems will remain forever
insoluble, unless new documents turn up to settle them.

The claim of the Norse discoveries to world interest
does not lie in their influence on later voyages, or on the
course of world history. It lies in their own intrinsic value.
They give American history a colorful opening, a series
of vivid scenes and characters which we should otherwise
have missed. They bring America into contact with one
of the most fascinating cultures of the old world, that of
Scandinavia in the viking age. They constitute the first
recorded feelers extended by Europeans towards a new
world of promise in the west. These early explorers and
settlers were filled with the same longing for wider oppor-
tunities as the later ones, and they had to face the same
problems of sustenance and protection. The Norse vikings
were the first American pioneers, and as such they deserve
an honorable place in the pageant of American history.

When the first Norwegian emigrants of modern times
began coming to America about a century ago, they were
at once moved by the parallel between their course and
that of the ancient discoverers of America. The first poem
known to have been composed by such an emigrant, writ-
ten on the Atlantic in 1837, struck the note that has re-
echoed among Norwegian-Americans for more than a
hundred years:

The Evidence of History 167

As ocean waves in ancient days

Oft cradled sturdy viking boats,

So troubled seas and fiercest storms

Can strike no fear in Norsemen's hearts.

And so to-day Norwegians greet

The distant shore of Vinland the Good.

The knowledge that their ancestors were the first to visit
these shores has always given Scandinavian immigrants a
special bond with America. But for them the story was
tinged with sadness, too, for (in the words of the Nor-
wegian historian, P. A. Munch) if the vikings had been
successful, " Scandinavian settlers, with Scandinavian lan-
guage and nationality, would perhaps have played the
same role in America as the English and their descendants
to-day/'

The unwillingness of some American historians of an
older school to grant full recognition of the Norse discov-
ery in American textbooks has always been a disturbing
fact to Americans of Scandinavian origin. As custodians
of Leif Ericson's honor, they have felt themselves com-
pelled to agitate for such recognition. The first book pub-
lished by a Norwegian in this country on a scholarly topic
was an effort to convert Americans to the Scandinavian
way of thinking. This was the challenging and pugnacious
little book entitled America Not Discovered by Columbus,
written in 1874 by Rasmus B. Anderson, first professor of
Scandinavian languages at the University of Wisconsin.
The book was a mere uncritical summary of the arguments
of Rafn, but it won a wide audience, and led eventually
to a movement for the official recognition of Leif Ericson
as the proper discoverer of America.

The first fruit of Anderson's agitation was the unveiling
in Boston of a Leif Ericson statue by Anne Whitney on
October 29, 1887. The original plan had been that An-

Voyages to V inland

derson and the great Norwegian violinist Ole Bull should
gather funds in the Middle West and place the statue on
the Campus of the University of Wisconsin. But this came
to naught, and the idea was taken over by a committee
of prominent Bostonians, including the authors Holmes,
Lowell, and Longfellow. On November 15, 1887, a replica
of this statue was set up in Juneau Park, Milwaukee, by
Mrs. J. F, Gilbert, a wealthy lady of that city whose inter-
est is said to have been in the statue, not the discovery.
In the late eighties a statue of Leif by Sigvald Asbj0rnsen
was erected in Humboldt Park, Chicago. A monument of
Thorfinn Karlsevni by Einar Jonsson was unveiled in
Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, on November 20, 1920.
In 1930 the United States Congress donated a ten-foot
statue of Leif Ericson by A. Stirling Calder to Iceland on
the occasion of its millennial celebration of statehood. A
painting of Leif Ericson discovering America, copied
from the work of the Norwegian painter Christian Krogh,
hangs in the halls of Congress, a gift from Norwegians to
the United States, presented on March 23, 1936. A square
in Brooklyn, a street in Chicago, parks everywhere have
been named after Leif Ericson.

There has even been a strenuous effort to consecrate a
special day to his memory. It became common in the
nineties for Norwegian-American organizations to cele-
brate the memory of the discoverers some time in the fall,
when the grapes began to ripen. In 1923 an organization
known as the Leif Ericson Memorial Association was cre-
ated, and October 9 selected as its date. In states with large
Scandinavian populations this day has been officially rec-
ognized as a day to be observed in the public schools.
The first state to adopt it was Wisconsin, on May i o, 1 92 9;
the next was Minnesota, in April, 1931; others have fol-
lowed their example. In one year, 1 935, it was even recog-

The Evidence of History 169

nized by the Congress of the United States, as a day of
tribute to the Scandinavian element in our population.

In spite of the fulsome veneration with which the figure
of Leif Ericson has often been surrounded, and his eleva-
tion to a kind of Norwegian sainthood, the story of the
sagas lives on as one of the great epics of exploration. It is
a courageous tale of human hopes and aspirations, capable
of being enjoyed without any regard to its results or its
significance.

NOTES AND INDEX

NOTES AND REFERENCES

So many excellent books have been drawn upon in the
preparation of this survey that it is a pleasure to list some
of them here. These will offer ideas and material for any
interested reader who may wish to pursue the subject fur-
ther. For more complete bibliographies of the Vinland
voyages one should turn to Halldor Hermannsson's The
Northmen in America (Ithaca, New York, 1909) and
A. W. Br0gger's Vinlandsferdene (Oslo, 1937) . The most
comprehensive and unbiased piece of scholarship in the
field is The Finding of Wineland the Good by Arthur
Middleton Reeves (London, 1890), a stately work pre-
senting phototypic reproductions of the original manu-
scripts with complete translations and documentation. To
this the reader is constantly and enthusiastically referred.
Gratitude is also due Professor Halvdan Koht for valuable
oral suggestions.

FOREWORD. Page vi: The Holiday Press version ap-
peared in 1941 in an edition limited to 350 copies; it was
specially prepared by a group of craftsmen, employes of
the Lakeside Press, who have made it their hobby to pro-
duce fine books. Page vi: The original manuscripts are
now available in a newer reproduction than that of Reeves
in the impressive series Corpus Codicum Islandicorum
Medii Aevi, published in Copenhagen by Ejnar Munks-
gaard. The Flateyjarbok appeared in 1930 (introduction
by Finnur Jonsson) and the AM 557 4to in 1940 (intro-
duction by Dag Stromback) . Page vi: Samuel Laing's
translation of the Greenland Saga appeared originally in
the appendix of his Heimskringla; or the Chronicle of the
Kings of Norway (London, 1844) and was reprinted in
Everyman's Library (Volume 717) in 1915. Reeves'

174 Notes and References

translation was reprinted in The Northmen Columbus
and Cabot, edited by Julius Olson (New York, 1906) .
G, M. Gathorne-Hardy's translation is a part of his The
Norse Discoverers of America (Oxford, 1921) and was
reprinted in A. W. Lawrence and Jean Young, Narratives
of the Discovery of America (New York, 1931) . Page vi:
One of the most interesting examples of saga translation
is The Laxdtela Saga by Thorstein Veblen, famous Nor-
wegian-American economist (New York, 1925).

THE SAGA OF VINXAND. Page 4: The interpretation of
" hall-beams " (Old Norse setstokkar) is that of Valtyr
GuSmundsson, Privatboligen pa Island i Sagatiden (Co-
penhagen, 1889) , pp. 213-14, 220-21. Others believe that
they were the carved posts of the * high seat ' in the hall,
but this seems unlikely.

ADAM OF BREMEN. Page 97: Adam of Bremen's Gesta
Hammaburgensis ecclesice pontificum may be read in a
German translation by J. C. M. Laurent (Leipzig, 1886) ;
his life and work are discussed in E. Wessen, Studier til
Sveriges hedna mythologi och fornhistoria (Uppsala,
1924) , and in Johannes Steenstrup, Det danske Folks His-
torie (Copenhagen, 1927) , Vol. II, page 13. Page 98: Svein
Estridsson (ruled 1047-76) is described by Steenstrup
in the work just cited, page 9. Page 99 : The story of AuSun
occurs in Morkinskinna, a compilation of sagas about the
kings of Norway. Page 99: The * learned Swedish scholar *
was Olof Rudbeck, who published his Atland eller Man-
heim at Uppsala about 1 689.

THE LEARNED MEN OF ICELAND. Page 101: For an ac-
count of the Christianizing of Iceland see Knut Gjerset,
History of Iceland (New York, 1924) . Page 101: On the
runic alphabets see Otto von Friesen, ed., Runorna (Stock-
holm, 1933) and Helmut Arntz, Handbuch der Runen-

Notes and References 175

kunde (Halle, Saale, 1935) . Page 102: Ari froSi's Islend-
ingabok has been edited and translated by Halldor
Hermannsson in Islandica, Vol. XX (Ithaca, New York,

1930)-
VIKING TRADITIONS. Page 105: Good accounts o viking

life and civilization are found in T. D. Kendrick, A His-
tory of the Vikings (New York, 1930), in Axel Olrik,
Viking Civilization (New York, 1930), and in Allen
Mawer, The Vikings (Cambridge, 1913) . Page 106: The
story of Bjorn, son of Brynjolf, is found in EgiVs Saga,
chapter 32, and is supposed to have taken place about 900.
Page 108: Old Norse-Icelandic literature is ably summa-
rized in Bertha Phillpotts, Edda and Saga (New York,
1931) ; the Sagas in Halvdan Koht, The Old Norse Sagas
(New York, 1 93 1) and in Knut Liest01, The Origin of the
Icelandic Family Saga (Oslo, 1930) . Page 109: Lord Rag-
lan's views are presented in The Hero (New York, 1937) ,
an incisive but somewhat superficial treatment of the
problem.

THE Two VERSIONS. Page 112: See Halldor Hermanns-
son, Icelandic Manuscripts (Ithaca, New York, 1929).
Page 113: What is here known as the " Karlsevni Saga "
has since Storm been generally known as the " Saga of
Eric the Red "; we are here following the suggestion made
by Hermannsson (Problem of Wineland, page 29) . An-
other common name for it is the " Hauksbok Version."
The Greenland Saga is generally referred to as either the
" Tale of the Greenlanders " or the " Flatey Book Ver-
sion/' Page 114: The only important treatments of the
problem here discussed which appeared before Gustav
Storm were those of Tormod Torfaeus in 1705 and Carl
Christian Rafn in 1837. Storm's monograph appeared in
Aarbtfger for nordisk Oldkyndighed (Copenhagen) , 1887

Notes and References

(English version entitled Studies on the Finland Voyages,
1889) . The other discussions will be found listed in the
notes to WHERE WAS VINLAND.

THE LAND OF ERIC THE RED. Page 117: The papal letter
was issued by Alexander VI and is printed in Norsk His-
torisk Tidsskrift for 1892, page 407; it also appeared in
Vol. 1 6 of the Norroena series ( 1 906) , edited by Rasmus B.
Anderson, where it was claimed to be newly discovered,
and to refer to Vinland, neither of which is true. Page 1 2 o:
An excellent account of the Greenland excavations is avail-
able in Poul N0rlund, Viking Settlers in Greenland (Lon-
don, 1936) . Many treatises have appeared in Meddelelser
cm Gr0nland (Copenhagen, 1 890 to date) . The old,
written sources on Greenland are gathered in Gr0nlands
Historiske Mindesmcerker (3 vols., Copenhagen, 1845).
Page 123: King Christiern's plans are revealed by a papal
letter of June 20, 1519, which may be found in Diplo-
matarium Norvegicum XVII (1902-13) , 1 164.

VOYAGES TO VINLAND. Page 159: The eminent special-
ist in Greenlandic, W. Thalbitzer, has made an effort to
interpret the babblings of Karlsevni's savages in terms of
Eskimo (Forhandlinger of the Danish Scientific Academy,
1905), but without much success. Page 129: On the
Freydis incident see Stefan Einarsson in Ada Philologica
Scandinavica XIII (1938-9) , 246-56. Page 131: On
Gudrid and the witchcraft scene see Dag Stromback, Sejd
(Stockholm, 1935) , 49-60.

WHERE WAS VINLAND? Page 135: The following are
some of the most important works which have advanced
original theories on the location of Vinland on the basis
of sound and admissible evidence: Gustav Storm (previ-
ously cited) , 1887; John Fiske, The Discovery of America
(2 vols., Boston, 1892) ; M. L. Fernald, Notes on the
Plants of Wineland the Good (Rhodora, Vol. 12, Bos-

Notes and References 177

ton, 1910) ; William H. Babcock, Early Norse Visits to
North America (Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections,
Washington, D. C., 1913) ; William Hovgaard, The Voy-
ages of the Norsemen to America (New York, 1914) ; Fin-
nur Jonsson, Opdagelsen af ogRejserne til Vinland (Aar~
bfigerfor nor disk Oldkyndighed, Copenhagen, 1915) ; H.
P. Steensby, The Norsemen's Route from Greenland to
Wineland (Meddelelser om Grtfnland, Copenhagen,
1917) ; G. M. Gathorne-Hardy, The Norse Discoverers of
America (Oxford, 1921) ; Matthias Thordarson, The V in-
land Voyages (American Geographical Society, Research
Series No. 18, New York, 1930) ; M. Mjelde, The Norse
Discoveries of America (Saga-Book of the Viking Society,
London, 1928-29) ; Halldor Hermannsson, The Problem
of Wineland (Ithaca, New York, 1936) ; A. W. Br0gger,
V inlands fer dene (Oslo, 1937) . Of historical interest are
also the solutions offered by Tormod Torfaeus in His-
toria Vinlandiae antiquae, sen partis Americae septen-
trionalis (Copenhagen, 1705; English translation, New
York, 1891) and by Carl Christian Rafn in Antiquitates
Americanae sive Scriptores Septentrionales Rerum Ante-
Columbianarum in America (Copenhagen, 1837). Page
136: The Canadian journalist is James W. Curran, Here
-was Vinland, America's Strangest Story (Sault Ste. Marie,
Canada, 1939) . Page 137: The statement by Finnur
Jonsson appears in Den oldnorske og oldislandske Littera-
tursHistorie (Copenhagen, 1902) , III, 80. Page 141: On
eyktarstad. The 4gth-degree solution was worked out by
the Norwegian astronomer Hans Geelmuyden; a new so-
lution, proposed by M. Mjelde in 1922, brings it down
to the 37th degree. Page 143: The theory that these ele-
ments were drawn from classic tales of the Fortunate Isles
was launched by the great Norwegian explorer Fridtjof
Nansen, In Northern Mists (London, 1911), but has

Notes and References

found little support. Page 143: An etymology of Vinland
varying from the usual one, by which vin should mean
6 meadow/ instead of ' wine ' or ' vine/ is impossible for a
number of reasons, as shown by Finnur Jonsson in Norsk
Historisk Tidsskrift (Oslo, 1911) .Page 144* the southern
limit of the salmon is established from information found
in Check List of the Fishes and Fishlike Vertebrates of
North and Middle America by D. S. Jordan, W. Ever-
mann, H. W. Clark (Document 1055, United States Bu-
reau of Fisheries Report, 19*8) . Page 144- Etymology of
skraeling taken from Alf Torp, Nynorsk etymologisk ord-
bok (Oslo, 1919) ; it is much to be preferred over the Es-
kimo origin suggested by Thalbitzer.

IN SEARCH OF RELICS. Page 146: Reeves' comment on
Rafn is very apt: ". . . He has seriously qualified the
credit to which he is entitled by the extravagant theories
and hazardous statements to which he gave currency, and
which have prejudiced many readers against the credibil-
ity of the records themselves/' (Op. cit., 98) . Page 146:
Thomas W. Higginson wrote in Harper's Magazine, 1883
(Vol. 65, 515-^7) , repeated in his Larger History of the
United States (New York, 1886), 58-51. Page 148: The
Dighton Rock has been made the subject of a brilliant
work by Edmund Burke Delabarre, Dighton Rock. A
Study of the Written Rocks of New England (New York,
19*8) . Most of the information here given is drawn from
his study. Page 151 : On the Newport Tower see J. G. Pal-
frey, History of New England (Boston, 1858) , 57-9; a pic-
ture of a stone mill at Chesterton, England, almost identi-
cal to the Newport Tower is reprinted in the Higginson
article cited above. At the very time this book goes to
press, a new and challenging study of the Newport Tower
has just appeared: Philip Ainsworth Means, Newport
Tower (New York, 1945) . This writer, an Associate in

Notes and References iyo

Anthropology at Harvard's Peabody Museum, claims to
have destroyed the generally accepted theory, thereby
opening the possibility that the tower was not originally a
windmill. Although Mr. Means does not assert its viking
origin, he believes there is a strong chance that excavations
may support this theory. Simultaneously the problem has
been attacked by Mr. Holand, who reaches similar conclu-
sions and inevitably attributes the tower to the Paul Kmit-
son expedition, presumably on its way to Minnesota to
make the Kensington Stone. Like so many theories of Vin-
land, these contain more guesswork than fact; but the vistas
are undeniably intriguing! Page 153: A description of
Horsfords 7 excavations will be found in his Leifs Houses
in V inland (Boston, 1893), one of the many expensive
publications which he issued. Page 156: The rock on No
Man's Land is discussed and interpreted in Edward F.
Gray, Leif Eriksson, Discoverer of America A.D. 1003
(New York, 1 930) ; in spite of his great interest in the rock,
however, Mr. Gray does not believe that it can be adduced
" as scientific evidence to corroborate the view that No
Man's Land was the winter headquarters of the Vinland
Expeditions." Page 156: The classic presentation of the
evidence for the Kensington Stone is Mr. Holand's West-
ward from Vinland (New York, 1940) ; in spite of its elo-
quence and undeniable value, it has not cleared away all
the objections of scholars. Pages 157-58: The works here
referred to are Reider T. Sherwin, The Viking and the
Red Man (New York, 1940) ; William B. Goodwin, The
Truth about Leif Ericsson and the Greenland Voyages to
New England (Boston, 1941) ; Olaf Strandwold, Runic
Rock Inscriptions along the American Atlantic Seaboard
(Prosser, Washington, 1939) . An earlier effort of similar
validity is Thomas E. Pickett, The Quest for a Lost Race
(Louisville, Kentucky, 1907) .

Notes and References

RESULTS AND SIGNIFICANCE. Page 162: From maps and
treatises it clearly appears that Greenland was believed to
be continuous with the European continent; see Reeves,
Op. cit., 15 ff. Page 162: The early references to Vinland
are gathered in Reeves, Op. cit., 92 ff., and in Georg Fried-
erici, Der Charakter der Entdeckung und Eroberung
Amerikas durch die Europder (Stuttgart, 1936) , III, 54.
The Danish clergyman was Glaus Lyschander. A transla-
tion o Hugo Grotius's Dissertatio de origine gentium
Americanarum appeared in Edinburgh in 1884 (On the
Origin of the Native Races of America} . Page 163: Jens
Munk's story of his voyage, Navigatio Septentrionalis, was
republished and edited by P. Lauridsen (Copenhagen,
1883) . Page 163: Finn Magnusen's statement appeared in
Athene (Copenhagen, 1813) . Page 163: The story of the
Columbus-Leif Ericson theory is outlined briefly in
Br0gger, Vinlandsferdene, iSgff. (who does not believe
that anything Columbus might have learned from the Ice-
landers would have been of any value to him) . Malte-
Brun's theory was tentatively presented in his Precis de la
geographic universelle (Paris, 1810 ff.) . Lowell's poem is
entitled "Columbus" (Poetical Works, 1896, p. 485).
Page 165: This problem is the chief subject matter of
Vilhjalmur Stefansson's Ultima Thule (New York, 1940) .
Page 166: The latest discussion is in Samuel Eliot Mori-
son, Admiral of the Ocean Sea (2 vols., Boston, 194*) , I,
32-35; Morison reaches the same conclusion as the one
here presented, previously advanced by the Norwegian
historians Gustav Storm and A. W. Br0gger. But Morison
as in error when he refers to the theory as a " new ' Nordic '
myth "; it is neither new nor specially Nordic. Page 166:
On the likelihood that a Norwegian expedition on Portu-
guese initiative sailed to Labrador in the 1470*8 see Br0g-
ger, Vinlandsferdene, 175 ff.; it is associated with such

Notes and References 181

names as Pining, Pothorst, and Johannes Scolvus, and is
surrounded with much uncertainty. Pages 16667: The
Norwegian-American poem was written by Ole Rynning,
and is available in Theodore C. Blegen and Martin B.
Ruud, Norwegian Emigrant Songs and Ballads (Minne-
apolis, 1936) , 24 ff. Page 167: The quotation from P. A.
Munch appeared in Alumuevennen (Oslo, 1850) . Page
167: The fashion in American textbooks may have been
set by George Bancroft, who in his History of the United
States (Vol. I, 1834) wrote: " The story of the coloniza-
tion of America by Northmen rests on narratives mytho-
logical in form, and obscure in meaning, ancient yet not
contemporary.

INDEX

Adam of Bremen 97-100, 102, 142,
143, 160, 164

Alexandria, Minnesota 156, 157

Algonquin 157

Alptafjord 51

AM. 557, 410. 113

America 106, 117, 125, 126, 130,
132-137, 145* M 6 * H 8 ' *54 l6o >
162, 163

America Not Discovered by Co-
lumbus 167

Amsterdam 162

Anderson, Rasmus B. 167

Antiquitates Americanae 146

Ari Thorgilsson " The Wise," 102,
103

Arnamagnean Library 113

Arnarstapi 33, 34, 38

Arnold, Governor Benedict 151

Asbj^rnsen, Sigvald 168

Aslak of Longdale 4

Atlantic Ocean 105, 117, 121, 124,
132, 166

Atlantic seaboard 135, 136, 154, 156

Atlantis 164

Audun of the West Tjords 99

Avalldama 76

Avilldudida 76

Babcock, William H. 139
Baffin's Land 139
Baltic Sea 152
Bard 7

Bear Island 57, 139
Bear Isles 57
Beothuk Indians 145
Berkeley, George 148
Biglow Papers 150-151
Bjami Grimolfson, joins Karlsevni
51, 54, 61, 65, 75; death 79-80;

discussion 128, 131; Lowell's sat-
ire 151

Bjarni Herjulfson, sights America
7-11, 15, 17, 18; discussion ix,
113, 125, 137-140, 164

Bjorn, Bishop 92

Bjorn, son of Karlsevni 92

Bjorn Brynjolfson 106

Bjorne, erroneous form for Bjarni
(Herjulfson) 164

Black Death 123, 161

Black-sark 5

Book of Settlement 3, 104

Borgf jord 5

Boston 142, 153, 154

Boston Back Bay 141, 153

Bradford, Massachusetts 155

Brand, Bishop 92

Brattahlid, Eric's farm in Green-
land, spelling x; settled 5; other
references 12, 14, 17, 25, 44, 48,
52-54; excavations 121

Breidabolstead 4

Bremen 91, 97, 102, 142

Bristol, England 166

British Isles 105

Broadfjord x, 5, 37, 51, 113

Br0gger, A. W. 114

Brokey 3

Brooklyn 168

Bull, Ole 168

cabhail 58

Cabot, John 132, 166

Calder, A. Stirling 168

Calmar, Union of 161

Canada 143

Canute [Knut] the Great 98

Cape Cod 142, 144

Carder, Jacques 133, 143, 144

11

Index

Chaleur Bay 140

Champlain 143

Chicago v, ix, 168

Christian IV, King of Denmark
and Norway 162

Christianity, introduced in Ice-
land 6, 101, 102, 106; in Green-
land 13, 14, 120-121

Christiern II, King of Denmark
and Norway 123

Columbus ix, 123, 161; supposed
familiarity with Norse discov-
eries 163166

Copenhagen, manuscripts in 112,
113

Crossness 30

Cu Chulainn 129

dagmdlastad 141

Davis, John 124

Davis Strait 126, 129

Delabarre, Edmund Burke 154

Delaware 144, 145

Denmark 99, 102, 122, 160-163

Denys 143

Dighton Writing Rock 148-149,

*54> *57
Dimun's Bay 4
dcegr 138
Drangar 3, 4
Drepstock 7
Dublin 80, 106

East Fjords 83

Eastern Settlement (Greenland)

5, 120, 123, 129
Eastfjord 51
Edda, the Elder, 122; the Younger,

141

Egede, Hans 124
Einar of Thorgeir's Fell 33-34, 37,

106
Einarsson, Stefdn 129

England 106, 161, 166

Ephraim, Wisconsin 156

Eric the Red, explores and settles
Greenland 3-6, 117121; chil-
dren 12; resistance to conversion
14, 130; falls off horse 19, 131;
entertains Karlsevni 51-53, 128;
other references 7, 25, 37, 44, 46,
54, 57, 76; discussion 103, 113,
114, 116, 126, 127, 150, 154

Eric's Bay 4

Eric's Holm 5

Eric's Island 5

Ericsfjord 5, 14, 25, 30, 45, 48, 51,
88

Ericsstead 3, 4

Eskimos, mode of life 121-124; in-
vasion of Norse settlements 123;
other allusions 129, 133, 144

eyktarstad 21, 141

Eyolf from Sviney 4

Eyolf the Filthy 3

Eyrar 8

Fairmount Park, Philadelphia 168

Fall River, Massachusetts 151

Faroe Islands 105, 106, 125

Fernald, M. L. 144

Fernando, Columbus' son 164

Finland 99

Finnbogi 83, 84, 87

Fiske, John 136, 142

Flatey 113

Flatey Book 112, 113, 129

Fortunate Isles 143

France 106, 161, 162

Freydis, Eric's daughter 54; fright-
ens savages 72, 73; expedition to
Vinland 83-88, 114, 129-130

Gardar 12, 83, 120
Gathorne-Hardy, G. vi, viii, 113,

136

Index

111

Geirstein 3

Gerry's Landing 141, 153

Gilbert, Mrs. J. F. 168

Glaumbo 91, 92

Gray, Edward 142

Greater Ireland 76, 115

Greenland, discovery and settle-
ment 3-6, 103-104; origin of
name 5, 119; introduction of
Christianity 14, 131; history of
Norse settlements 117-124; con-
tact re-established in modern
times 162; numerous other ref-
erences

Greenland Saga, differences from
Karlsevni Saga 113-116; Chapter
2, 7-11; Chapter 4, 17-25; Chap-
ter 5, 26-30; Chapter 8, 45-48;
quoted 57, 71; Chapter 13, 83-
89; Chapter 14, 91-92; chronol-
ogy 126-130; discussion 131, 137,
139-140, 142, 144

Gregory VII 98

Grotius, Hugo 162

Gudrid, daughter of Thorbjorn 12;
emigrates from Iceland 33-38;
helps Witch 39-43; married to
Thorstein Ericson 45-48; mar-
ried to Karlsevni 51-53; at
Streamfjord 75; return to Ice-
land 91-92; discussion 114, 130-

iS 1

Gudrid, wife of Thori 25
Gulf of St. Lawrence 128, 129, 138,

H5

Gunnbjorn 4, 118, 125
Gunnbjorn's Reefs 5, 118

Haki 55, 57, 58, 115
Halldis 33, 38, 43
Hallfrid 92
Hallgerd 130
Hamburg 97

Harvard 146, 153

Hauk Erlendson 113

Hank's Book 113

Hawkdale x, 3, 118

Hebrides 7, 12, 13, 91, 105, 115,
126

Heimskringla 114

Hekja 55, 57-58, 115

Helgi 83, 84

Helluland, named by Leif 18;
named by Karlsevni 57; discus-
sion x, 127, 139, 150

Herjulf 7, 8, 11

Herjulfsness 8, 11, 38

Hermannsson, Halld6r 114, 140

Higginson, Thomas W.' 146

Holand, Hjalmar Ruud 156

Holiday Press vi

Holmes, Oliver Wendell 168

Hop 65, 75, 76, 141

Hornstrands 3

Horsford, Eben 141, 153

Hovgaard, William 114, 115, 136,

*39

Hraunhofn [Lava Harbor] x, 38
Hudson Bay 136
Hudson, Henry 133, 143
Humboldt Park, Chicago 168
husasnotra 91
Hvarfsgnipa 5

Iceland 3, 4 et passim

Illugi 4

Indians, appearance in sagas, 66 ft;
discussion 115, 129-134; identity
with Skraelings 144, 145; rock
carvings 149, 154; see also Skrael-
ings

Ingolf at Holmlatr 5

Ingolf, first settler in Iceland 7

Ireland 45, 62, 79, So, 106, 138

Jadar 3

Jon Hakonarson 113

IV

Index

Jonsson, Arngrimur 162
J6nsson, Einar 168
Jonsson, Finnur 114, 137
Jorand Ulfson 3
Juneau Park, Milwaukee 168

Karlsevni, spelling x; meaning of
nickname 5 1 ; married to Gudrid
51-53; expedition to Vinland
54-80; return to Greenland 76,
83; return to Iceland 88, 91-92;
discussion 106, 113-114, 122,
128-129, 133, i37-i4 H5 1 49>
168

Karlsevni Saga, differences from
Greenland Saga 113-116; Chap-
ter 3, 12-14; Chapter 6, 33-38;
Chapter 7, 39-44; Chapter 8,
45-48; Chapter 9, 51-53; Chap-
ter 10, 54-65; Chapter 11, 66-76;
Chapter 12, 79-80; Chapter 14,
91-93; chronology 126-128; dis-
cussion 133, 137, 139-140, 143-
144

Keelness 31, 57, 61, 62, 75, 140

Kensington Stone 156-157

Krogh, Christian 168

Labrador 127, 128, 138-140, 144,

H5

Laing, Samuel vi, vii, 157

Lanier, Sidney 150

Lapps 129

Laugarbrekka 34

Lava Harbor [Hraunhofn] 38

Leif Ericson, spelling viii-ix; voy-
age to Norway 12-14; rescues
men ori reef 14, 22; called ' the
Lucky* 14, 127; explores Vin-
land 17-25; disapproves of Frey-
dis's actions 88; other references
vii, 26, 30, 45, 57, 83, 84; discus-
sion 113, 115, 120, 126, 127, 130,

137-141, 145, 150, 154, 156, 158,

164, 167-169
Leif Ericson Memorial Association

168

Leif Ericson statues 168
Leifsbooth (see Leif s camp) 150
Leif s camp 26, 29, 141, 150, 153
Lescarbot 143
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

152, 168
Lowell, James Russell 150-151,

164-168
Lysuf jord 46

Magnusen, Finn 148, 149, 163

Maine 145

Malte-Brun, Johannes 163

Mandan Indians 157

Markland, spelling x; named by

Leif 18; named by Karlsevni 57;

capture of savages 76; ship from.

104; probable identifications

127-128, 139-140; timber 134;

literary allusion 150
Martha's Vineyard 142
Massachusetts 136, 140, 148, 151,

154-156, 158

Mather, Cotton no, 148, 154
Micmac Indians 145
Mid-Glacier 5
Middle West 148, 157
Milwaukee, Wisconsin 168
Minnesota 156-158, 168
Mjelde, M. M. 136
mosur 14, 91, 144
Mount Hope Bay 141
Munch, P. A. 167
Munk, Jens 162

Naddod 125

New Brunswick 140, 143
New England 126, 127, 129, 136,
138-140, 143, 145, 147, 148, 157

Index

New England poets 148

New York 136

Newfoundland 126-128, 136, 138,

139. Hi* 143* H5
Newport tower 151, 152
Nibelungs 122

No Man's Land, Massachusetts 156
N0rlund, Poul 123
Normandy 106
North Dakota 157
Northman's Written Rock 155
Northwest Passage 162
Norumbega 153, 154
Norway 3, 7 et passim
Nova Scotia 126, 127, 129, 133, 136,

138, 140, 145

Odd at Jorvi 3

Ojibwa Indians 132

Olaf Haraldson, King of Norway

106
Olaf Trygvason, King of Norway

12-14, 57> ll %> 126-127
Orkneys 106

Orm of Arnarstapi 33-38
Ortelius, Abraham 162
Osvald 3
Oxney 3
Ox-Thorix, 3

Pagan elements 12, 43, 61, 131
Passamaquoddy Bay 143, 145
Philadelphia 168
Phoenicians 148
Plutarch 129

Portsmouth, Rhode Island 154
Portsmouth Harbor 158
Portugal 161

Rafn, Carl Christian 136, 141, 146,

149-151, 163, 167
Raglan, Lord 109
Raven the Fighter 3

Ravensf jord 5

Reeves, Arthur Middleton viviii

Reykjaness 7

Reyniness 51

Rhode Island 136, 141, 151, 154

Rome 92, 130, 164

Royal Danish Society of Northern

Antiquaries 146, 150
Runes 101, 102, 121, 149, 156

Saga of Burnt Njal 130
Saga of Eric the Red (here re-
ferred to as the Karlsevni Saga)

"3

Saga of the Ere-Dwellers 4

Sagas, kinds and origin of, reliabil-
ity 107111

Saxony 91

Schoolcraft, H. R. 132

Scotland 12, 106

Scots 5758, 115, 142

Shetlands 105, 106, 125

Sigrid 46, 47

Binding, P. C. 149

Skagafjord 51, 91

Skeleton in Armor 152

Skraelings, earliest allusion 103; in
the saga 6677; identity 132134;
origin of term 144; other allu-
sions 115, 149

Snorri, Karlsevni's son, born in
Vinland 76, 92, 93, 130

Snorri Sturluson 114, 141

Snorri the Chief 4

Snorri Thorbrandson, joins Karls-
evni 52, 54, 62, 66, 71, 72, 75

Snowfell 5

Snowfell-Glacier 5

Snowfellsness 35

Sogn 106

Song of the Breakers 7

Spain 161, 165

Steensby, H. P. 136, 139

VI

Index

Stefansson, Vilhjalmur 165

St. Lawrence River 136, 140

Stockness 44

Storm, Gustav 114, 136, 139, 147,

165

Strait of Belle Isle 128
Stream Isle 58
Streamfjord 58, 61, 75, 76, 129, 132,

138, 140, 142, 158
Studies in the Finland Voyages 147
Styr 4
Sudrey x, 4

Svein Estridson 98, 99
Sweden 122, 161

Tale of the Greenlanders (here re-
ferred to as the Greenland Saga)

**3

Taunton River 150
Thjodhild, Eric's wife i, 14
Thor 61, 130

Thorbjorg the Shipbreasted 3
Thorbjorg the Witch 39-44
Thorbjorn, father of Gudrid, emi-
grates from Iceland 33-38, 44, 54
Thorbjorn of Hawkdale 3
Thorbjorn Vifilson 4
Thorbrand, father of Snorri 51
Thorbrand, son of Snorri 72
Thorbrand of Swandale 4
Thord Horsehead 51
Thord the Yeller 4
Th6r$arson, Matthias 114, 136
Thorfmn Karlsevni, see Karlsevni
Thorgeir, son of Snorri 92
Thorgeir of Hitterdale 4
Thorgeir of Thorgeir's Fell 33
Thorgeir's Fell 33
Thorgerd 7
Thorgest 4, 5
Thorgils, Leif's son 13
Thorgunna 12, 13
Thorhall Gamlason 51, 54

Thorhall the Hunter, joins Karls-
evni 54; practises magic 61;
makes verses, leaves Karlsevni
62; lost 62, 75; discussion 115,
128, 129, 130, 138

Thori 25, 26

Thorkel 38-43

Thorlak, Bishop 92

Thorsness 4

Thorstein Ericson 12; marries
Gudrid 45; attempts a voyage to
Vinland 45-46; dies 4649; dis-
cussion 127, 131

Thorstein the Black 46-49

Thorunn, granddaughter of Karls-
evni 92

Thorunn, mother of Karlsevni 51

Thorvald, Eric's father 3, 118

Thorvald Ericson vii, 12; voyage
to Vinland 26-31; other refer-
ences 45, 76, 114; discussion 127,
137, 138, 140, 149

Thorvard, husband of Freydis 12,

54, 81, 87
Thule 164
Tile see Thule
Tiverton, Rhode Island 154
Torfaeus, Tormod 163
Tradar 3
Trondheim 126
Tyrker, on Leifs expedition 17;

finds grapes 21-23; discussion

vii, 115, 130, 154

Ulf, son of Ox-Thori 3
Ulf the Crow 4
University of Wisconsin 168
Uvege 76

Valthjof 3

Valthjof s Stead 3

Vethilldi 76

Viking, probable origin 105

Index

Vll

Vinland, explored by Leif 1723;
named by Leif 22; sought by
Xhorstein Ericson 45; called
" the Good " 54, 134; earliest
reference (Adam of Bremen)
98-99; confused with Finland
99; referred to by Ari 103; in the
Book of Settlement 104; discus-
sion of voyages made 125131;
purpose of voyages 131; prob-
able location 135145; other al-
lusions x, 26, 61, 74, 83, 91, 92,
111, 113-115, 150, 156, 161, 162,
164, 165; see also Winland

Virginia 136, 142, 149

Vog 7

Warlocks 40, 43

Washington, George 148-149, 151

Waterhorn 3

West Newbury, Massachusetts 154

Western Settlement (Greenland)

46, 57, 120, 123, 128, 138
White Men's Land 76
Whitney, Anne 167
Whittier, J. G. 154-155, 159.
Wilbur, Homer, M. A. 150
William of Normandy 97
Winland 98, 99 (see Vinland)
Wisconsin 156, 168
Witchcraft (see Pagan elements)

39 ff., 131
Wonderstrands x, 57, 58, 61, 62,

140

Yngvid 92

PRINTER'S NOTE

The text of this book was set on the Linotype in Baskerville.
The punches for this face were cut under the supervision of
George W. Jones an eminent English printer. Linotype Bas-
kerville is a facsimile cutting from type cast from the original
matrices of a face designed by John Baskerville. The original
face was one of the forerunners of the " modern " group of
type faces.

Typography and binding designs by W . A. Dwiggins. Com-
posed., printed, and bound by The Plimpton Press, Norwood^
Massachusetts.

o,

" NE of the most exciting stories of early
America is that of the vikings who settled the
shores of New England five centuries before
Columbus sailed westward. Yet most of us
think of those Norsemen's voyages as hardly
more than poetic legends, stirring ta read but
far off in time, vague in outline, and full
of improbable imaginings. In this remarkable
book Einar Haugen dears away the mists of
legend and tells us, as far as any man can tell
us today, what actually happened.

As a first step, he has made a new transla-
tion, into plain modern English, of the Ice-
landic sagas which tell of the discovery and set-
tlement of Vinland the Good the Greenland
Saga, Thorfinn Karlsevni's Saga and its twin,
the Saga of Eric the Red. These he has pieced
together into a straightaway running narra-
tive, the story of Vinland told by the vikings
themselves. It is a story by turns exciting,
bloody, naive, and deeply moving. Yet it is al-
ways a tale of simple men embarked on high
adventure, told as simple men would tell it

To this original viking account, Professor
Haugen has added extensive commentaries of
his own, shrewdly critical chapters which dis-
cuss the probable accuracy of the sagas, and
tell of the Vinland legend as it developed in
later, days. He shows why tidings of the new
land did not gain more currency in medieval
Europe, and how these old stories may or may
not have influenced Columbus. He tells of the
Jsforse "relics" that stirred New England a
century ago the Skeleton in Armor, the New-
port Round Tower, and all the others, die
fakes, the mistakes, " the few that are perhaps
genuine. He lielps us, in short, to see the
vikings in America clear and true, as the sim-
ple and fugged men they were.

A strange book this, and one that fires the
imagination as few other works of such scholar-
ship could do. ; Whether your interest lies in
the antiquities of America, or merely in a good
story excitingly told,, you will find it worth
your reading. And the 20 two-color woodi-cuts
by FREDERICK TRENCH CHAPMAN will Md
immeasurably to your pleasure in this fine and
finelv-oroduced vokttnej

1 34 947